Born, at Warwick, 30 Jan. 1775. At school at Knowle, 1779–85; at Rugby, 1785–91. With private tutor, 1791–93. Matric. Trin. Coll., Oxford, 13 Nov. 1792; rusticated, 1794; did not return to Oxford. Visit to Paris, 1802. Settled at Bath, 1805; intimacy with Southey begun, 1808. In Spain, Aug. to Nov. 1808. Settled at Llanthony Abbey, Monmouthshire, 1809. Married Julia Thuillier, May 1811. Removed to Jersey, and thence to Tours, 1814. To Italy, Sept. 1815. Lived at Como, 1815–18. At Pisa, 1818–21. At Florence, 1821–35. Visit to England 1832. Quarrelled with his wife and went to England, 1835. Returned to Florence, 1858. Died there, 17 Sept. 1864. Works: “Poems,” 1795; “Moral Epistle respectfully dedicated to Earl Stanhope,” 1795; “Gebir” (anon.), 1798 (Latin version, by Landor, 1803); “Poems from the Arabic and Persian” (anon.), 1800; “Poetry” (anon.), 1802; “Simonidea” (anon.), 1806; “Three Letters to D. Francisco Riqueline,” 1809; “Count Julian” (anon.), 1812; “Commentary on the Memoirs of Mr. Fox” (anon.), 1812; “Idyllia Heroica,” 1814 (enlarged edn., 1820); “Poche Osservazioni sullo stato attuale di que’ popoli che vogliono governarsi per mezzo delle Rappresentanze,” 1821; “Imaginary Conversations,” vols. i, ii, 1824; vols. iii, iv, 1828; vol. v, 1829; “Gebir Count Julian, and other Poems,” 1831; “Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare” (anon.), 1834; “The Letters of a Conservative,” 1836; “Terry Hogan” (anon., attrib. to Landor), 1836; “Pericles and Aspasia,” 1836; “A Satire on Satirists,” 1836; “The Pentameron and Pentalogia” (anon.), 1837; “Andrea of Hungary and Giovanna of Naples,” 1839; “Fra Rupert,” 1840; “Works” (collected 2 vols.), 1846; “Hellenics,” 1847; “Poemata et Inscriptiones,” 1847; “Imaginary Conversation of King Carlo Alberto and the Duchess Belgoioiso,” 1848; “Italics,” 1848; “Popery, British and Foreign,” 1851; “Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans,” 1853; “The Last Fruit off an Old Tree,” 1853; “Letters of an American,” 1854; “Letter … to R. W. Emerson,” [1856]; “Antony and Octavius,” 1856; “Dry Sticks,” 1858; “Hebrew Lyrics” (anon.), 1859; “Savonarola e il Priore di San Marco,” 1860; “Heroic Idyls, with additional poems,” 1863. Collected Works: in 8 vols., 1876. Life: by J. Forster, 1869; by Sidney Colvin, 1881.

Personal

  Differing as I do from him in constitutional temper, and in some serious opinions, he is yet of all men living the one with whom I feel the most entire and cordial sympathy in heart and mind; were I a single man, I should think the pleasure of a week’s abode with him cheaply purchased by a journey to Florence, though, pilgrim-like, the whole way were to be performed on foot.

  Mr. Landor, who has long been known to scholars as a Latin poet beyond the elegance of centos, and has lately shown himself one of our most powerful writers of prose, is a man of a vehement nature, with great delicacy of imagination. He is like a stormy mountain pine, that should produce lilies. After indulging the partialities of his friendships and enmities, and trampling on Kings and ministers, he shall cool himself, like a Spartan worshipping a moon-beam, in the patient meekness of Lady Jane Grey…. Mr. Landor’s conversation is lively and unaffected, as full of scholarship or otherwise as you may desire, and dashed now and then with a little superfluous will and vehemence, when he speaks of his likings and dislikes. His laugh is in peals, and climbing: he seems to fetch every one from a higher story.

  Met to-day [1830] the one man living in Florence whom I was anxious to know. This was Walter Savage Landor, a man of unquestionable genius, but very questionable good sense; or rather, one of those unmanageable men,—

	“Blest with huge stores of wit,
	Who want as much again to manage it.”

He was a man of florid complexion, with large, full eyes, and altogether a leonine man, and with a fierceness of tone well suited to his name; his decisions being confident, and on all subjects, whether of taste or life, unqualified; each standing for itself, not caring whether it was in harmony with what had gone before or would follow from the same oracular lips. But why should I trouble myself to describe him? He is painted by a master hand in Dickens’ novel, “Bleak House,” now in course of publication, where he figures as Mr. Boythorn. The combination of superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness, so admirably portrayed in “Bleak House,” still at first strikes every stranger—for twenty-two years have not materially changed him—no less than his perfect frankness and reckless indifference to what he says.

  Landor, as usual, with the very finest man’s head I have ever seen, and with all his Johnsonian disposition to tyrannise and lay down the law in his talk, restrained and refined by an old-world courtesy and deference towards his bright hostess, for which chivalry is the only right word.

  The high breeding and urbanity of his manners, which are very striking, I had not been taught to expect…. His avoidance of general society, though courted to enter it, his dignified reserve when brought in contact with those he disapproves, and his fearless courage in following the dictates of a lofty mind, had somehow or other given the erroneous impression that his manners were, if not somewhat abrupt, at least singular. This is not the case, or, if it be, the only singularity I can discern is a more than ordinary politeness towards women…. The politeness of Landor has nothing of the troublesome officiousness of a petit-maître, nor the oppressive ceremoniousness of a fine gentleman of l’ancien régime; it is grave and respectful, without his ever losing sight of what is due to himself, when most assiduously practising the urbanity due to others. There is a natural dignity which appertains to him that suits perfectly with a style of his conversation and his general appearance.

  A tall, broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large fierce-rolling eyes; of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by the most perfect breeding,—expressing itself in high-colored superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a dry, sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper; the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right,—as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object; and sides of an object are all he sees. He is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs over the spectacle of common-place torn to rags.

  Of all the literary men with whom Lady Blessington came in contact—and they certainly were not few or undistinguished—at home and abroad, the person whom she looked upon with the most respect, honour and affectionate regard, was Walter Savage Landor.

  On the 15th May [1833] I dined with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath,—an untamable petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind and he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He praised the beautiful cyclamen which grows all about Florence; he admired Washington; talked of Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he is decided in his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well content to impress, if possible, his English whim upon the immutable past…. Mr. Landor carried to its height the love of freak which the English delight to indulge, as if to signalize their commanding freedom. He has a wonderful brain, despotic, violent and inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by what chance converted to letters; in which there is not a style or a tint not known to him, yet with an English appetite for action and heroes. The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures. Landor is strangely undervalued in England; usually ignored and sometimes savagely attacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be right or wrong, and is quickly forgotten; but year after year the scholar must still go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant sentences; for wisdom, wit and indignation that are unforgettable.

  We left Mr. Landor in great comfort. I went to see his apartment before it was furnished. Rooms small, but with a look out into a little garden; quiet and cheerful and he doesn’t mind a situation rather out of the way. He pays four pound ten (English) the month. Wilson has thirty pounds a year for taking care of him, which sounds a good deal; but it is a difficult position. He has excellent, generous, affectionate impulses, but the impulses of the tiger every now and then. Nothing coheres in him, either in his opinions, or I fear, affections. It isn’t age; he is precisely the man of his youth, I must believe. Still, his genius gives him the right of gratitude on all artists at least, and I must say that my Robert has generously paid the debt. Robert always said that he owed more as a writer to Landor than to any contemporary. At present, Landor is very fond of him; but I am quite prepared for his turning against us as he has turned against Forster, who has been so devoted for years and years. Only one isn’t kind for what one gets by it, or there wouldn’t be much kindness in this world.

  He who is within two paces of his ninetieth year may sit down and make no excuses; he must be unpopular, he never tried to be much otherwise; he never contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far eastern uplands, meditating and remembering.

  He had in him a strong faculty of admiration; and a deep, pure, fresh current of tenderness and sweetness ran under the film of gall which Nature unhappily shed over his existence at the fountain. This was one of the contradictions of which this paradoxical being was made up; and it is, with the rest, worthy of some contemplation; not because paradoxical persons or the paradoxes they produce are choice objects of study in a striving and practical age like ours, but because Landor achieved some things that were great, and many that were beautiful, in spite of the paradoxical elements of his life and character.

  Though followed by two younger brothers, as soon as they could be received at Rugby, there remains nothing worth recording till he was twelve years old,—when a violent fit of the gout—gout which might have qualified him for an alderman—restored him to his mother’s care at Warwick. Never was there a more impatient sufferer; and his imprecations, divided equally between the gout and his nurses, were heard afar. It is also strange that there was never any return of this disorder. Our father suffered from it, and all three of the younger brothers; but though Walter’s appetite much surpassed the best of ours (or the worst) he escaped it during more than seventy years. However active at dinner, he was always temperate after it; and I never saw the smallest sign of excess, though he greatly enjoyed two or three glasses of light wine.

  For a moment I recall the well-remembered figure and face, as they first became known to me nearly thirty years ago. Landor was then upwards of sixty, and looked that age to the full. He was not above the middle stature, but had a stout stalwart presence, walked without a stoop, and in his general aspect, particularly the set and carriage of his head, was decidedly of what is called a distinguished bearing. His hair was already silvered gray, and had retired far upward from his forehead, which, wide and full but retreating, could never in the earlier time have been seen to such advantage. What at first was noticeable, however, in the broad white massive head, were the full yet strangely-lifted eyebrows; and they were not immediately attractive. They might have meant only pride or self-will in its most arrogant form, but for what was visible in the rest of the face. In the large gray eyes there was a depth of composed expression that even startled by its contrast to the eager restlessness looking out from the surface of them; and in the same variety and quickness of transition the mouth was extremely striking. The lips that seemed compressed with unalterable will would in a moment relax to a softness more than feminine; and a sweeter smile it was impossible to conceive. What was best in his character, whether for strength or gentleness, had left its traces there. It was altogether a face on which power was visibly impressed, but without the resolution and purpose that generally accompany it…. The eye is fine; but black hair covers all the forehead, and you recognize the face of the later time quite without its fulness, power and animation. The stubbornness is there, without the softness; the self-will, untamed by any experience; plenty of energy, but a want of emotion. The nose was never particularly good; and the lifted brow, flatness of cheek and jaw, wide upper lip, retreating mouth and chin, and heavy neck, peculiarities necessarily prominent in youth, in age contributed only to a certain lion-look, he liked to be reminded of, and would confirm with a loud, long laugh hardly less than lionine. Higher and higher went peal after peal, in continuous and increasing volleys, until regions of sound were reached very far beyond ordinary human lungs.

  It was impossible to be in Landor’s society a half hour and not reap advantage. His great learning, varied information, extensive acquaintance with the world’s celebrities, ready wit, and even readier repartee, rendered his conversation wonderfully entertaining. He would narrate anecdote after anecdote with surprising accuracy, being possessed of a singularly retentive memory, that could refer to a catalogue of notables far longer than Don Giovanni’s picture-gallery of conquests. Names, it is true, he was frequently unable to recall, and supplied their place with a “God bless my soul, I forget everything;” but facts were indelibly stamped upon his mind. He referred back to the year one with as much facility as a person of the rising generation invokes the shade of some deed dead a few years.

  The arms were very peculiar. They were rather short, and were curiously restrained and checked in their action at the elbows; in the action of the hands, even when separately clenched, there was the same kind of pause, and a noticeable tendency to relaxation on the part of the thumb. Let the face be never so intense or fierce, there was a commentary of gentleness in the hands, essential to be taken along with it…. In the expression of his hands, though angrily closed, there was always gentleness and tenderness; just as when they were open, and the handsome old gentleman would wave them, with a little courtly flourish that sat well upon him, as he recalled some classic compliment that he had rendered to some reigning Beauty, there was a chivalrous grace about them such as pervades his softer verses.

  I met him first in 1847, when he was seventy-three years of age…. I was visiting Mr. Brabant in Bath, and we were at Mr. Empson’s “old curiosity shop,” when we saw what seemed a noble-looking old man, badly dressed in shabby snuff-colored clothes, a dirty old blue necktie, unstarched cotton shirt—with a front more like a night-gown than a shirt—and “knubbly” apple-pie boots. But underneath the rusty old hat brim gleamed a pair of quiet and penetrating gray-blue eyes; and the voice was sweet and masterly; the manner that of a man of rare distinction.

  He had a stately and agreeable presence, and the men of letters from different countries who brought introductions to him spoke of his affectionate reception, of his complimentary old-world manners, and of his elegant though simple hospitality. But it was his conversation that left on them the most delightful and permanent impression; so affluent, animated and coloured, so rich in knowledge and illustration, so gay and yet so weighty—such bitter irony and such lofty praise uttered with a voice fibrous in all its tones, whether gentle or fierce—it equalled, if not surpassed, all that has been related of the table-talk of men eminent for social speech. It proceeded from a mind so glad of its own exercise, and so joyous in its own humor, that in its most extravagant notions and most extravagant attitudes it made argument difficult and criticism superfluous. And when memory and fancy were alike exhausted, there came a laughter so pantomimic yet so genial, rising out of a momentary silence into peals so cumulative and sonorous, that all contradiction and possible affront were merged forever.

  Landor was to all intents and purposes, in the narrowest as well as in the broadest sense of the word, a gentleman. He was a gentleman by birth, by association, by his tastes and habits; and not only a gentleman, but a refined, elegant and classical scholar by education. Yet he was one of the most determined h-murderers that I ever heard speak. He talked always of his ’ouse, his ’orse and his ’ome. I do not think that he went upon the compensation principle of introducing the unfortunate letter where it ought not to be heard.

  The Prince of Carpi said of Erasmus he was so thin-skinned that a fly would draw blood from him. The author of the “Imaginary Conversations” had the same infirmity. A very little thing would disturb him for hours, and his friends were never sure of his equanimity. There were three things in the world that received no quarter at his hands, and when in the slightest degree he scented hypocrisy, pharisaism, or tyranny, straightway he became furious, and laid about him like a mad giant.

	High from his throne in heaven Simonides,
	Crowned with wild aureole of memorial tears
	That the everlasting sun of all time sees
	All golden, molten from the forge of years,
	Smiled, as the gift was laid upon his knees
	Of songs that hang like pearls in mourners’ ears
	Mild as the murmering of Hymettian bees
	And honied as their harvest, that endears
	The toil of flowery days;
	And smiling perfect praise
	Hailed his one brother mateless else of peers.
	*        *        *        *        *
	The mightiest heart since Milton’s leapt,
	The gentlest since the gentlest heart of Shakespeare slept.
	*        *        *        *        *
	All sweet, all sacred, all heroic things,
	All generous names and loyal, and all wise,
	With all his heart in all its wayfarings
	He sought, and worshipped, seeing them with his eyes
	In very present glory, clothed with wings
	Of words and deeds and dreams immortal, rise
	Visible more than living slaves and kings,
	Audible more than actual vows and lies.

  Dashed by his volcanic temperament and his blinding imagination into collision with facts, he suffered shipwreck once and again. But if we apply to his character and career the measure not of results, but of intention, we shall acknowledge in Landor a model on the heroic scale of many noble and manly virtues. He had a heart infinitely kind and tender. His generosity was royal, delicate, never hesitating. In his pride there was no moroseness, in his independence not a shadow of jealousy. From spite, meanness or uncharitableness he was utterly exempt. He was loyal and devoted in friendship, and, what is rare, at least as prone to idealize the virtues of his friends as the vices of his enemies. Quick as was his resentment of a slight, his fiercest indignations were never those which he conceived on personal grounds, but those with which he pursued an injustice or an act of cruelty; nor is there wanting an element of nobleness and chivalry in even the wildest of his breaches with social custom. He was no less a worshipper of true greatness than he was a despiser of false. He hated nothing but tyranny and fraud, and for those his hatred was implacable. His bearing under the consequences of his own impracticability was of an admirable courage and equanimity.

  In 1811 he married a very pretty girl aged seventeen, Miss Julia Thuillier. She was a moneyless damsel, of noble Swiss family, and was remarkable for the rich abundance of her curls; her tone of mind, romantic and self-indulgent; her charms of person, coupled with much youthful amiability. Landor married her for her good looks, and perhaps little true sympathy existed between them. There were quarrels and reconciliations, and the poet, in the earlier years of his marriage, showed as much forebearance as was consistent with one of the least forebearing and intolerant, imperious, liberty-loving characters on record. At last, after they had had four children, Landor left his wife behind in Fiesole, near Florence, returned to England, and would never see her again; the motive was probably nothing more unbearable than what he would now at length no longer bear, incompatibility of temper. He relinquished to her his Italian villa and almost the whole of his fortune. In advanced age, towards 1855, he returned to Florence; but he lived in lodgings, and there he died in 1864, aged eighty-nine. His wife outlived him till the spring of 1879, dying at the age of eighty-five.

  Ranking high among the men of genius to whom the nineteenth century has given fame, his career as a man of letters points a moral indeed, but it is by showing that vicious propensities are sure to produce wretchedness, for his misery was entirely of his own creating; his life was a perpetual wrangle, notwithstanding the advantages he inherited, and might have enjoyed, from the cradle to the grave—his many rich gifts of fortune and of nature. Handsome in his youth, of goodly presence when I knew him in 1836, of great physical as well as intellectual strength, inheriting large property; well if not nobly born, with natural faculties of a high order duly trained by an excellent education—these advantages were all rendered not only futile, but positive sources of evil, by a vicious disposition, ruled by a temper that he himself described as “the worst beyond comparison that man was ever cursed with,” but which he made no effort to guide, restrain or control.

  You felt yourself in the presence of one who was emphatically a Man, not the image of a man; so emphatically, indeed, that even Carlyle thought the journey to Bath not too dear a prize to pay for seeing him, and found something royal in him. When I saw him he was in his seventy-eighth year, but erect and vigorous as in middle life. There was something of challenge even in the alertness of his pose, and the head was often thrown back like that of a boxer who awaits a blow. He had the air of the arena. I do not remember that his head was large, or his eyes in any way remarkable.

  In the north Park Cemetery of Calcutta there is a black marble slab containing the inscription:

	IN MEMORY OF
	The Honourable
	ROSE WHITWORTH AYLMER,
	who departed this life March 2d, A.D. 1800.
	Aged 20 years.

This name calls to mind the most romantic period of the life of Walter Savage Landor. Landor left Oxford in 1797. He spent some time on the Welsh coast, where he made the acquaintance of Lord Aylmer’s family. An attachment sprang up between Rose, the daughter of Lord Aylmer, and young Landor. One day she loaned him a book from the Swansea Circulating Library. It was a romance by Clara Reeve. Here he found an Arabic tale which so profoundly impressed him that it suggested his first great work, “Gebir.”… Landor, in his poem, “Abertawy,” indicates both her unwillingness to go and his own sorrow at her departure.

  Landor’s character is sufficiently marked by his life. Throughout his career he invariably showed nobility of sentiment and great powers of tenderness and sympathy, at the mercy of an ungovernable temper. He showed exquisite courtesy to women; he loved children passionately, if not discreetly; he treated his dogs (especially “Pomero” and “Bath”) as if they had been human beings, and loved flowers as if they had been alive. His tremendous explosions of laughter and wrath were often passing storms in a serene sky, though his intense pride made some of his quarrels irreconcilable. He was for nearly ninety years a typical English public school boy, full of humors, obstinacy, and Latin verses, and equally full of generous impulses, chivalrous sentiment, and power of enjoyment. In calmer moods he was a refined epicurean; he liked to dine alone and delicately; he was fond of pictures, and unfortunately mistook himself for a connoisseur. He wasted large sums upon worthless daubs, though he appears to have had a genuine appreciation of the earlier Italian masters when they were still generally undervalued. He gave away both pictures and books almost as rapidly as he bought them. He was generous even to excess in all money matters. Intellectually he was no sustained reasoner, and it is a mistake to criticise his opinions seriously. They were simply the prejudices of his class. In politics he was an aristocratic republican, after the pattern of his great idol Milton. He resented the claims of superiors, and advocated tyrannicide, but he equally despised the mob and shuddered at all vulgarity. His religion was that of the eighteenth-century noble, implying much tolerance and liberality of sentiment, with an intense aversion for priestcraft. Even in literature his criticisms, though often admirably perceptive, are too often wayward and unsatisfactory, because at the mercy of his prejudices. He idolized Milton, but the mediævalism of Dante dimmed his perception of Dante’s great qualities. Almost alone among poets he always found Spenser a bore.

  When, resolute not to pay the damages cast against him in a trial for libel, a libel which the quick-tempered old poet ought not to have uttered, although indeed it was not uncalled for, Landor sold off all he had and quitted England to end his days in Italy, he left in my hands a pile of leaflets to be distributed in justification of his action. It was really a repetition of the libel, and, thinking such a course unworthy of so great a man, I burned the leaflets, every one. Some while after he sent to Browning, as a present for me, a large picture he supposed to be by Michael Angelo. Landor at one time had a large collection of pictures, supposed to be genuine, but seldom if ever of any worth. This “Angelo” might be of that sort. I called on Browning (the only time I ever saw him) to look at and to speak about the picture. It was a “Last Judgment,” a poor and very unpleasant composition, too large and too unpleasant to be hung in a private house, a gift as of a white elephant, neither to be accepted nor refused.

  Another of our habitués on my first visit to Florence was Walter Savage Landor. At that time he was, with his dear Pomeranian dog, Giallo, living alone in very ordinary lodging in Florence, having quarreled with his family and left his villa in their possession. He had a grand, leonine head with long white hair and beard, and to hear him denouncing his children was to witness a performance of “Lear” never matched on any stage. He was very kind to me, and we often walked about odd nooks of Florence together, while he poured out reminiscences of Byron and Shelley, some of which I have recorded, and of others of the older generation whom he had known, so that I seemed in touch with them all. He was then about eighty-eight years of age, and perhaps his great and cultivated intellect was already failing. Much that he said in wrath and even fury seemed like raving, but he was gentle as a child to us women, and to his dog whom he passionately loved.

  Landor’s face put me in mind of the portraits of Hogarth. He had a diabolical laugh—a prolonged mockery, with apparently no heart or happiness in it, and when you thought he had done he went on and on; perhaps his extreme age was the cause of his prolongation, but not of its timbre. He gave me an apercu of his views on art, politics and literature. I suppose he was a very wrong-headed man, and that his fierce individuality (Welsh choler) made his acquaintance as uncomfortable as his friendship was perilous. Every now and then the Tuscan States rang with his ’larum, and at one time he made Florence too hot to hold him. A paradoxical old Jacobin, it seemed to me that there was nothing really genial about the man Landor. Alfred Tennyson tells me he used to meet him at Mr. John Forster’s chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; that one day, while Landor was reciting some poetry, a member of the company tumbled down stairs and broke his leg, and that Landor the while went on spouting without showing any special concern.

  We cannot wonder that the Italians failed to understand this imperious and eccentric Englishman. Strange stories about him were current among the people. He was believed to have challenged the Secretary of Legation for whistling in the street when Mrs. Landor passed; to have walked up to the judges in a court of justice, with a bag of dollars in his hand, asking how much was necessary to obtain him a favourable verdict; to have thrown his cook out of the window, for neglect of a dinner, and while the man lay groaning on the ground with a broken limb, thrust his head out with the exclamation “Good God, I forgot the violets!”

  Landor lies under a flat white marble stone in the English Cemetery here, on the left of, and not very far from, the entrance. The inscription simply bears his name and records the fact that it is “The Last Sad Tribute of his Wife and Children.”

  My mother’s near relationship to the Rose Aylmer of his boyish romance was the first link in the chain of this long friendship, for he remembered her as a little girl running by her sister, Rose Alymer’s side. They never met after that until 1835 at Florence, and the intimacy continued which ceased only with their lives. It must have been to the charm of that inherited name that I am indebted for the many lovely verses—then so carelessly appreciated, now so deeply valued—with which he honoured a young and ignorant girl…. He was as full of fun as a boy; but if sometimes his boisterous spirits outran his discretion a reproving look would instantly restore his balance. These letters may not add one laurel to his brow, but their tenderness and grace will cling round his memory like the perfume of the gracious cyclamen, the flower he loved so well.

Gebir, 1798

  At Bristol I met with the man of all other whom I was most desirous of meeting—the only man living of whose praise I was ambitious, or whose censure would have humbled me. You will be anxious to know who this could be. Savage Landor, the author of “Gebir,” a poem which, unless you have heard me speak of it, you have probably never heard of at all.

  Mr. Walter Savage Landor, a very worthy person, I believe, and author of an epic piece of gossiping called “Gebir,” upon the strength of which Mr. Southey dedicated to him his “Curse of Kehama.” There is really one good passage in “Gebir” about a seashell, and the author is one of those dealers in eccentric obscurity, who might promise to become something if they were boys; but these gentlemen have now been full-grown for some time, and are equally too old and too stubborn to alter. I forbear to rake up the political allusions in a poem which nobody knows.

  His first work was a poem, viz. “Gebir;” and it had the sublime distinction, for some time, of having enjoyed only two readers; which two were Southey and myself. It was on first entering at Oxford that I found “Gebir” printed and published,—i. e. nominally made public, whereas all its advertisements of birth and continued existence were but so many notifications of its intense privacy. Not knowing Southey at that time, I vainly conceited myself to be the one sole purchaser and reader of this poem. I even fancied myself to have been pointed out in the streets of Oxford, where the two Landors had been well known in times preceding my own, as the one inexplicable man authentically known to possess “Gebir,” or even (it might be whispered mysteriously) to have read “Gebir.” It was not clear but this reputation might stand in lieu of any independent fame, and might raise me to literary distinction.

  Its merit lies apart from either intention or construction, style and treatment constituting the charm of it. It presents many splendours of imagination, in a setting of unusual strength and range of mind. The characteristics preëminent in it are the intellect and reflection which pervade and interfuse its passion; the concentration yet richness, of its descriptive power; the vividness with which everything in it is presented to sight as well as thought; the wealth of its imagery; and its marvels of language. Everywhere as real to the eye as to the mind are its painted pictures, its sculptured forms, and the profusion of its varied but always thoughtful emotion. These qualities have not even yet had general acknowledgement; but the effect produced by the poem upon a few extraordinary men was such as to more than satisfy any writer’s ambition. The mark it made in Landor’s life will constantly recur; and of the manner in which his genius affected his contemporaries, not by influencing the many, but by exercising mastery over the few who ultimately rule the many, no completer illustration could be given.

  Never was there a swifter stride made than from Landor’s prentice-work to “Gebir,” which displayed his royal poetic genius in full robes. Where now be his politics and polemics? Henceforth his verse, for the most part, is wedded to pure beauty, and prose becomes the vehicle of his critical or controversial thought. In “Gebir,” art, treatment, imagination, are everything; argument very little; the story is of a remote, Oriental nature, a cord upon which he strings his extraordinary language, imagery, and versification. The structure is noble in the main, though chargeable, like Tennyson’s earlier poetry, with vagueness here and there; the diction is majestic and sonorous, and its progress is specially marked by sudden, almost random, outbursts of lofty song. I do not hesitate to say that this epic, as poetry, and as a marvelous production for the period and for Landor’s twenty-two years, stands next to that renowned and unrivalled torso, composed so long afterward, the “Hyperion” of John Keats.

  The transitions from one theme to another are effected with more than Pindaric abruptness, and the difficulty of the poem is further increased by the occurrence of grammatical constructions borrowed from the Latin, and scarcely intelligible to those ignorant of that language. It is only after considerable study that the reader succeeds in taking in “Gebir” as a whole, however much he may from the first be impressed by the power of particular passages. Next to the abruptness and the condensation of “Gebir,” its most striking qualities are breadth and vividness of imagination. Taken severally, and without regard to their sequence and connection, these colossal figures and supernatural actions are presented with masterly reality and force. As regards style and language, Landor shows that he has not been studying the great masters in vain. He has discarded Bellona and the Zephyrs, and calls things by their proper names, admitting no heightening of language that is not the natural expression of heightened thought. For loftiness of thought and language together, there are passages in “Gebir” that will bear comparison with Milton. There are lines, too, that for majesty of rhythm will bear the same comparison; but majestic as Landor’s blank verse often is, it is always too regular; it exhibits none of the Miltonic variety, none of the inventions in violation or suspension of ordinary metrical law, by which that great master draws unexampled tones from his instrument.

  “Gebir” is jeweled with lines that are faultless, alike in rounded beauty of expression and majesty of rhythm. Nevertheless, “Gebir” is not exactly easy reading. The plot is at once dull and fantastic; the story drags; the breath of life is not in the characters.

  If Landor had had, at this earlier period, greater artistic poise and sureness, “Gebir” and not the “Lyrical Ballads” might now be held to signalize the triumph of the new romantic poetry. But the poem is incoherent and immature, and in spite of many beauties, is a failure. It lies outside Landor’s characteristic work, as do likewise the efforts which he made during the next twenty-five years in the romantic drama.

Count Julian, 1813

  I have finished “Count Julian” this evening…. It will have many defects; but I did not imagine I could do so well as I have done. The popularis aura, though we are ashamed or unable to analyse it, is requisite for the health and growth of genius…. I believe I am the first man who ever wrote the better part of a tragedy in a concert room…. It cannot be well done, written with such amazing rapidity. In forty hours I have done a thousand lines. Little of the original plan is retained, but about three hundred verses are unaltered, or nearly so. When my fingers are fairly well again, I will transcribe the whole for you, that the eye may take in all at a time. I ought to have it acted, as an indemnity for the sleeve of a new coat which it has actually made threadbare. Do not whisper to anyone that I have written a tragedy. My name is composed of unlucky letters. But if you know of any poor devil who can be benefited by the gift of one, he may have it—profit, fame and all; and what is more, if it is not successful, he may say it is mine. At all events, it will have a better chance with him than with me.

  I am not disappointed in Count Julian; it is too Greek for representation in these times, but it is altogether worthy of you. The thought and feeling which you have frequently condensed in a single line is unlike anything in modern composition. The conclusion, too, is Greek…. Never was a character more finely conceived than Julian. That image of his seizing the horses is in the very first rank of sublimity; it is the grandest image of power that ever poet produced.

  I have a tragedy of Landor’s in my desk, of which Count Julian is the hero; it contains some of the finest touches, both of passion and poetry, that I have ever seen.

  I must read again Landor’s “Julian.” I have not read it for some time. I think he must have failed in Roderick, for I remember nothing of him, nor of any distinct character as a character—only fine sounding passages.

  The position of Count Julian is one which might indeed be “majestically described,” and is worthy of the hand which showed us Hamlet and Othello, each in the centre of a world which had crumbled about him, undermined by that falsehood which is the death of every possibility…. Is such a hero as demands the hand of the highest genius.

  The sublimest poem published in our language between the last masterpiece of Milton and the first masterpiece of Shelley—one equally worthy to stand unchallenged beside either for poetic perfection as well as moral majesty—the lofty tragedy of “Count Julian,” which appeared in 1812, without the name of its author. No comparable work is to be found in English poetry between the date of “Samson Agonistes” and the date of “Prometheus Unbound;” and with both these great works it has some points of greatness in common. The superhuman isolation of agony and endurance which encircles and exalts the hero is in each case expressed with equally appropriate magnificence of effect. The style of “Count Julian,” if somewhat deficient in dramatic ease and the fluency of natural dialogue, has such might and purity and majesty of speech as elsewhere we find only in Milton so long and so steadily sustained.

  It shows the same defects of structure as “Gebir,” and the characters are unimpressive.

Poems

That deep-mouthed Bœoian “Savage Landor.”

  What is it that Mr. Landor wants, to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is he does not possess imagination in its highest form,—that of stamping il più nell’ uno. Hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid English.

  He writes criticism for critics, and poetry for poets; his drama, when he is dramatic, will suppose neither pit nor gallery, nor critics, nor laws. He is not a publican among poets—he does not sell his Amreeta cups upon the highway. He delivers them rather with the dignity of a giver to ticketed persons; analyzing their flavour and fragrance with a learned delicacy, and an appeal to the esoteric. His very spelling of English is uncommon and theoretic. And as if poetry were not, in English, a sufficiently unpopular dead language, he has had recourse to writing poetry in Latin; with dissertations on the Latin tongue, to fence it out doubly from the populace. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.

  The poetry of Savage Landor has not been so much read as his prose. His “Imaginary Conversations” have eclipsed his verse. Yet there is a great vigor, much satire, and much tender feeling in his poems which should render them acceptable to all lovers of manly writing.

  The style, tone, idiom and manner of Landor are all quite un-English. He never acquired the Saxon geniality of his mother-tongue; and his “Gebir,” “Count Julian,” and many of his other poems, read exactly like translations, closely rendered…. With many high excellencies, Landor’s poetry must ever remain “a sealed book” to the multitude; for whoever prefers to the obviously sublime, beautiful and true, the grotesque, the visionary, and the involved, must submit to be admired by the capricious select, who can alone relish such elements in composition.

  The difficulty in selecting from his works is the abundance; but I prefer the “Hellenics,” that charming volume, because, few, very few, have given such present life to classic subjects. I begin with the Preface, so full of grace and modesty.

  Walter Savage Landor is of all English modern poets the one least read by the public, and the one whom the fewest impostors care even to pretend they have read. The reasons for this are twain: he achieved a literary position so many years ago, that the new generation have never known him; and his poetry has not at any time been the fashion, its austere simplicity rendering it unintelligible to the mass of men. He himself has aptly compared it to the wood of the olive-tree, which is known when it burns by the purity of its flame and the paucity of its ashes.

  We place Landor, who was greater, even, as a prose-writer, among the foremost poets, because it was the poetry within the man that made him great; his poetry belongs to a high order of that art, while his prose, though strictly prosaic in form—he was too fine an artist to have it otherwise—is more imaginative than other men’s verses. Radically a poet, he ranks among the best essayists of his time; and he shares this distinction in common with Milton, Coleridge, Emerson, and other poets, in various eras, who have been intellectual students and thinkers. None but sentimentalists and dilettanti confuse their prose and verse,—tricking out the former with a cheap gloss of rhetoric, or the false and effeminate jingle of a bastard rhythm…. Landor belonged, in spite of himself, to the Parnassian aristocracy; was, as he has said, a poet for poets, and one who personally impressed the finest organizations. Consider the names of those who, having met him and known his works, perceive in him something great and worshipful.

  There is something glowing, soft, and Oriental about Landor’s genius. He stands alone in his gifts as clearly as any poet. Some of his minor works are worthy of a place in the Greek anthology.

  Though a great wit, a great thinker, a great Hellenist, rather than a great poet, Landor has written some verses distinguished by singular transparency of style and elevation of thought.

  The consummate grace of many of Landor’s smaller pieces will ever recommend them to the general reader, but the bulk of his poetry can only be appreciated by those who possess cognate tastes and something of similar acquisitions. There remains, however, a just interest in this signal example of the enduring dominion of the old classic forms of thought, not only over the young imagination, but over the matured and most cultivated intelligence.

  Landor was the earliest of our modern poets specially characterised by their devotion to ideal beauty and to classical associations. With classical literature his name has long been intimately joined, not only by many an “Imaginary Conversation,” in which the heroes, poets, and philosophers of antiquity are invoked from the shades, but yet more by his poetry, formed as that was, after a classical model,—his English poetry, not less than that written with such signal merit in the Latin language…. Landor’s poetry has sometimes been charged with a deficiency of pathos. It is true that in general he loves rather to exhibit human life in the exhilarating and equable light of day, than tinged with the lights of a low horizon, and clouded with the shadows of eve. His pathos has, notwithstanding, a peculiar depth and tenderness; and though unostentatious, is very far from being infrequent. The “Death of Artemidora” may serve as a specimen.

  Landor, notwithstanding his success in presenting objects of artistic beauty—and his poetry is full of exquisite delineations of them—failed to interest men; nor could his skill in expressing thought, although he was far more intellectual than his successors, save his reputation. Landor mistook a few of the marks of art for all. His work has the serenity, the remoteness, that characterize high art, but it lacks an intimate relation with the general life of men; it sets forth formal beauty, as painting does, but that beauty remains a sensation, and does not pass into thought. This absence of any vital relation between his art and life, between his objects and ideas, denotes his failure.

  As a poet Landor cannot rank with the greatest men of his time; he cannot, one need hardly say, stand beside Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth and Byron. But he did a kind of work unlike the work of any of these, and he did it almost perfectly. From the writings of greater poets, the finest spirits of their day, the deepest lovers of art, will again and again turn for change and refreshment to Landor’s idyllic verse. He was himself aware that his greatest work was done in prose.

	Come hither, who grow cloyed to surfeiting
	With lyric draughts o’ersweet, from rills that rise
	On Hybla not Parnassus mountain: come
	With breakers rinsed of the dulcifluous wave
	Hither, and see a magic miracle
	Of happiest science, the bland Attic skies
	True-mirrored by an English well;—no stream
	Whose heaven-belying surface makes the stars
	Reel, with its restless idiosyncrasy;
	But well unstirred, save when at times it takes
	Tribute of lover’s eyelids, and at times
	Bubbles with laughter of some sprite below.

  Landor’s Greek tales are written with a severity which in other hands would seem frigid and artificial; but his native grandeur of mind, his mingled passion and tenderness, triumph over this obstacle; the verse is hard and inflexible as marble, but it breathes and burns. He renders the hurly-burly of battle not, like Scott, by a sympathetic rush and tumult of style, but like a sculptor, by an intense and passion-fraught repose.

Pericles and Aspasia, 1836

  There is another characteristic of Landor’s writings, which I mention the more distinctly from the fact that it seems not to have much attracted the admiration even of his admirers,—and that is the depth and tenderness of feeling which they breathe. “Pericles and Aspasia,” especially, is full of the sweetest and truest expressions of sensibility; and so are many of the dialogues. We are frequently forced to drop the book and surrender ourselves to the visions and memories, soft or sad, which his words awaken and cause to pass before the mind.

  As an exhibition of intellectual beauty, may be termed the masterpiece of Landor’s whole career. Critics are not wanting who maintain “Pericles and Aspasia” to be the purest creation of sustained art in English prose…. Is clear as noonday, a book for thinkers,—but a book for lovers also, and should be as immortal as the currents which flow between young hearts.

  “Pericles and Aspasia,” like some of the classical “Conversations,” has the misfortune of being weighted with disquisitions too learned for the general reader, and not sound enough for the special student. But for this drawback, the book is throughout in Landor’s best manner. It is full of variety and invention; we pass from the performance of “Prometheus” before the assembled Athenians to Aspasia’s account of the dawn of love between herself and Pericles, and of the fascination and forwardness of the boy Alcibiades, to letters which reveal the love-frenzy of the unhappy Xeniades; then to others containing criticisms, accompanied by imaginary specimens, of various greater or minor Greek poets; and thence to original exercises in poetry by the correspondents themselves.

Pentameron, 1837

  I have just finished reading Landor’s “Pentameron.” It is full of interest for the critical and poetical mind, but is sullied by some Landorisms, which are less like weeds in a fine flower-bed than some evil ingredient in the soil, revealing itself here and there by rankish odors, or stains and blotches on leaf and petal.

  Petrarch and Boccaccio were highly esteemed by Landor, who did not sympathize with Lord Chesterfield in his opinion that the former deserved his Laura better than his lauro. The best evidence of this predilection is Landor’s great work, “The Pentameron,” second only to his greatest, “Pericles and Aspasia.” Its coleur locale is marvellous. On every page there is a glimpse of cloudless blue sky, a breath of warm sunny air, a sketch of Italian manner. The masterly gusto with which the author enters into the spirit of Italy would make us believe him to be “the noblest Roman of them all,” had he not proved himself a better Grecian. Margaret Fuller realized this when, after comparing the Pentameron and Petrarca together, she wrote: “I find the prose of the Englishman worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a happiness to see such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary.”

  A hundred volumes of travels and a thousand biographical and antiquarian dissertations would not place so vividly or graphically before the reader, with their appropriate framing of local scenery, the Tuscan peasant and the Tuscan priest as they were, and with small changes are still, and the Tuscan man of letters as he was in the middle ages. It is impossible to doubt that Landor had made himself thoroughly acquainted with the locality. But he has erred, or more probably has chosen to modify the real facts in his treatment of his fiction, in representing Boccaccio’s house to have been a “villetta hard by Certaldo,” and in that delicious account of Ser Francisco’s ride to his Sunday’s morning mass at the church of Certaldo. For the house is, as has been said, in the main street of the town, and within a hundred yards of the church. If, however, a more accurate accordance with the particulars of the locality had been the means of depriving us of the “crowned martyr’s” ride, and of the saddling of the canonico’s nag by the joint efforts of himself and Assuntina, we should have lost infinitely more than we could have gained in minuteness of matter of fact information.

  In the “Pentameron” Landor is again at his very best. All his study of the great Italian writers of the fourteenth century, and all his recent observations of Tuscan scenery and Tuscan character, are turned to skillful and harmonious account. Landor loved and understood Boccaccio through and through; and if he overestimated that prolific and amiable genius in comparison with other and greater men, it was an error which for the present purpose was almost an advantage. Nothing can be pleasanter than the intercourse of the two friendly poets as Landor had imagined it; nothing more classically idyllic than the incidental episodes. Even the humor of the piece is successful, in all at least that has to do with the characters of the sly parish priest, the pretty and shrewd servant-maid Assuntina, and her bashful lover.

Imaginary Conversations

  Now for twenty years we have still found the “Imaginary Conversations” a sure resource in solitude, and it seems to us as original in its form as in its matter. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page wherein we are always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all his chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for every just and generous sentiment and a scourge like that of furies for every oppressor, whether public or private,—we feel how dignified is the perpetual censor in his curule chair, and we wish to thank a benefactor of the reading world.

  Landor’s “Conversations,” among the most charming, profound, and delicate productions I have ever read.

  In our own time Walter Savage Landor has adopted and improved upon the model of Lyttelton and when his heroes talk they are certain to say something new.

  Well as he succeeded in hitting the mode of thought of many of his discoursing personages, it was by means of his learning and not of his sympathies, that he did so. They were all raised from the dead in their habits as they lived; but it was in order to be possessed by Landor in every case—his spirit speaking through their brains, perhaps, as well as through their lips—but always his spirit and no other. Hence his failures in the case of Milton, and partly, even in that of Cromwell; though there he might have been expected to succeed pre-eminently.

  His “Imaginary Conversations” are absolutely unique in their way, and betray an insight into the characters of men which no writer except Shakespeare has surpassed. These marvellous productions, sparingly read at present, will certainly outlive most of the imaginative literature of our time. To read them is like entering the stately halls and magical gardens of Alcinous, in the company of the lovely Nausicaa. The genius which enables Landor to comprehend and depict the characters of past history is so amazing, that we are apt to forget the splendid scholarship on which it is based…. He writes our language, in both prose and verse, with a strength and purity unrivalled in the present century.

  They have passed into literature and their influence and charm are undying…. Their personages are as noble as those of Sophocles, as sage and famous as Plutarch’s, as varied as those of Shakespeare himself.

  His “Imaginary Conversations” are full of fine thoughts, expressed in a style so finished, so eloquent, so clearly bearing the impress of genius and cultivated taste, so felicitous in imagery and in diction, that one wonders why they are in general so little read. The reason probably is that their subjects have little interest to people in general, and that their tone of sentiment does not for the most part appeal to the ordinary sympathies and emotions of humanity.

  There is, doubtless, something of labor in reading Landor’s “Conversations” if one is not conversant with high thinking, and if one is but slenderly endowed with the historic imagination, but the labor is not in the writing. The very form of conversation permits a quickness of transition and sudden shifting of subject and scene which enliven the art and give an inexhaustible variety of light and shade. One returns to passages again and again for their exceeding beauty of expression and their exquisite setting. To one accustomed to the glitter of current epigrammatic writing, the brilliancy of some of Landor’s sentences may not at first be counted for its real worth, but to go from Landor to smart writers is to exchange jewels for paste. What I have said may serve partly to explain the limited audience which Landor has had and must continue to have. If it is a liberal education to read his writings, it requires one to receive them freely. The appeal which Landor makes to the literary class is very strong, and apart from a course of study in the Greek and Latin classics, I doubt if any single study would serve an author so well as the study of Landor. Indeed, there is perhaps no modern work which gives to the reader not familiar with Greek or Latin so good an idea of what we call classical literature. Better than a translation is the original writing of Landor for conveying the aroma which a translation so easily loses. The dignity of the classics, the formality, the fine use of sarcasm, the consciousness of an art in literature,—all these are to be found in the “Imaginary Conversations;” and if a reader used to the highly seasoned literature of recent times complains that there is rather an absence of humor, and that he finds Landor sometimes dull, why, Heaven knows we do not often get hilarious over our ancient authors, and Landor, for his contemporaries, is an ancient author with a very fiery soul…. Landor is sometimes characterized as arrogant and conceited; stray words and acts might easily be cited in support of this, but no one can read his “Conversations” intelligently and not perceive how noble was his scorn of mean men, how steadfast his admiration of great men.

  I began to be not quite sure whether the balance of his sentences, each so admirable by itself, did not grow wearisome in continuous reading,—whether it did not hamper his freedom of movement, as when a man poises a pole upon his chin. Surely he has not the swinging stride of Dryden, which could slacken to a lounge at will, nor the impassioned rush of Burke. Here was something of that cadenced stalk which is the attribute of theatrical kings. And sometimes did not his thunders also remind us of the property-room? Though the flash failed, did the long reverberation ever forget to follow?

  One of the great charms of the “Conversations” is their unexpectedness, and want of visible sequence; one never knows whither the writer’s quickly changing moods will take him, or what surprises are not in store for the reader…. When Landor leaves the domain of what he has himself witnessed and experienced, he becomes wild, absurd and too often trivial. The conversations between ancient Greeks and Romans should be excepted, because of the fitness and propriety of these the judgment of the reader must be guided by a great familiarity with the classics, which Landor had, and by a large experience of humanity, in which he was notably deficient. What I particularly refer to are the Conversations, the scene of which is laid in Russia, Poland, or the East, on which his authorities were imperfect, and the spirit of which he by his nature could not understand.

  Landor was happy, too, in selecting the form of “Imaginary Conversations” between distinguished men of different ages and opinions. None other would have so well suited his mind, and brought into such perfect play his wide knowledge of men and books. His mind had a tendency, after a time, to run off any one direct track of thought into paradox and contradiction, and the form he selected gave scope to this peculiarity, without weakening the force of his views. These “Imaginary Conversations” abound with noble arguments and thoughts, worthy of the characters of those into whose mouths they are put, and I read them with great pleasure as well as profit.

  No finer specimens of dignity in letters can be seen than that evinced in the pages of this author’s “Imaginary Conversations,” in which, as he represents the greatest authors of all history holding high converse on exalted themes, he himself is in fullest sympathy with the theme and adds dignity to dignity by the personal decorum of his manner.

  To me, two of the most delightful features of the “Imaginary Conversations” are the tenderness so frequently displayed, and the delicate but sure handling of female character. I know of no more exquisite pathos, no more refined expression of the love of man and woman, no more truth to woman’s subtler instincts, than are to be found in such conversations as those between Æsop and Rhodope, between Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa, between Achilles and Helena, between Agamemnon and Iphigenia, between Dante and Beatrice.

  Which have given him his chief fame; but which, very possibly, may be outlived in the popular mind by the wonderful finish and the Saxon force which belong to many of his verselets…. There are seven great volumes of it all—which must belong to all considerable libraries, private or other, and which are apt to keep very fresh and uncut…. It is a great, wide, eloquent, homely jumble; one bounces from rock to rock, or from puddle to puddle (for there are puddles) at the will of this great giant driver of the chariot of imaginary talk.

  The “Conversations” display, in stiff and attic form, dramatic aptitudes, for confirmation of which we search in vain the pages of his academic plays. These historic dialogues, strange as it seems, were refused by publisher after publisher; but, at length, in 1824, two volumes of them were issued, and the world was gained. This great series of stately colloquies holds a unique position in English literature. The style of Landor is too austere, too little provided with ornament, too strenuously allusive to please the running reader. But in a mingling of dignity and delicacy, purity and vehemence, into what is an amalgam of all the rarer qualities of thought and expression, Landor ranks only just below the greatest masters of language. His genius is impeded by a certain haughty stiffness; he approaches majestically, and sometimes nimbly, but always protected from the reader by a suit of mail, always rendered inaccessible by an unconquerable shyness.

General

  There is little moral courage in our literary world. Few will speak what they think; and they gather what they think from conduits and common sewers rather than from springs and fountains. They do not guide the mass, but are moved along and soon confounded with it. In all other countries the literary part of the community is the best; in England, I am sorry to say, it is guided by spleen, fashion, and interest.

  Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the fatalest stuff I have seen for long: not an ingot; ah, no, a distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market.

  Yet it is not as an artist that Mr. Landor commends himself to us. He is not epic or dramatic, he has not the high, overpowering method by which the master gives unity and integrity to a work of many parts. He is too wilful, and never abandons himself to his genius. His books are a strange mixture of politics, etymology, allegory, sentiment, and personal history; and what skill of transition he may possess is superficial, not spiritual. His merit must rest, at last, not on the spirit of the dialogue or the symmetry of any of his historical portraits, but on the value of his sentences. Many of these will secure their own immortality in English literature; and this, rightly considered, is no mean merit. These are not the plants and animals, but the genetical atoms of which both are composed. All our great debt to the Oriental world is of this kind, not utensils and statues of the precious metal, but bullion and gold-dust. Of many of Mr. Landor’s sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those of Socrates; that they are cubes, which will stand firm, place them how or where you will.

  Mr. Landor is a man of genius and learning, who stands in a position unlike that of any other eminent individual of his time. He has received no apparent influence from any one of his contemporaries; nor have they or the public received any apparent influence from him. The absence of any fixed and definite influence upon the public is actually as it seems; but that he has exercised a considerable influence upon the minds of many of his contemporaries is inevitable, because so fine a spirit could never have passed through any competent medium without communicating its electric forces, although from the fineness of its elements, the effect, like the cause, has been of too subtle a nature to leave a tangible or visible impress…. Every sarcasm, irony, jest, or touch of humor, is secreted beneath the skin of each tingling member of his sentences. His wit and his humor are alike covered up amidst various things, apparently intended to lead the reader astray, as certain birds are wont to do when you approach the nests that contain their broods. Or, the main jests and knotty points of a paragraph are planed down to the smooth level of the rest of the sentences, so that the reader may walk over them without knowing anything of the matter. All this may be natural to his genius; it may also result from pride, or perversity. So far from seeking the public, his genius has displayed a sort of apathy, if not antipathy, to popularity; therefore, the public must court it, if they would enjoy it; to possess yourself of his wit you must scrutinize; to be let into the secret of his humor you must advance “pointing the toe.” Such are the impressions derivable from Mr. Landor’s writings.

  We know no author whose writings breathe a more conscious presence of nobility. His thought is perfect and entire, calm, clear, independent: it does not attempt to make you a convert; it is there without any declamation of apology, for you to return to it or not, as you choose; but you do return to it, fascinated by its brightness and single grandeur. Landor presents himself to us in his writings as a proud, intellectual man, an inflexible lover of truth, though not insensible to prejudice; of a native nobility of soul, quickly impressed by the show of manliness and worth; a sincere friend, and what, with a man of his temperament, is its correlative, a good hater; a fastidious, educated man, who carries his moral sensitiveness into the world of literature; a lover of poetry, he himself a poet. Mr. Landor’s poetry, however, is the poetry of the intellect rather than the heart.

  Is it not true that Landor, too, is one of the men who carry their passions about with them into everything, as a boy would pebbles, muddying every clear water, with a stone here and a stone there? The end is, that we lose the image of himself in the serene depth, as we might have had it—and the little stone comes to stand for him. How unworthy of such a man as Landor, such weakness is! To think with one’s temper! One might as well be at once Don Quixote, and fight with a warming pan.

  Mr. Landor, who always rises with his subject, and dilates like Satan into Teneriffe or Atlas when he sees before him an antagonist worthy of his powers, is probably the one man in Europe that has adequately conceived the situation, the stern self-dependency, and the monumental misery of Count Julian. That sublimity of penitential grief, which cannot accept consolation from man, cannot hear external reproach, cannot condescend to notice insult, cannot so much as see the curiosity of bystanders,—that awful carelessness of all but the troubled deeps within his own heart, and of God’s spirit brooding upon their surface, and searching their abysses.

  Though he could not be deprived of his daily bread for his sins of plain speaking, yet he has had his share of the malevolence of the low and selfish. The reptiles have bitten, and no doubt have stung, at times, deeply, when he has trodden them beneath his feet, or flung among them his scalding and clinging Greek fire. But he knows that the fruit of his life will not be lost. Already he has lived long enough to see that the tide of opinion and reform is setting in strongly in the direction which he has indicated. It is amazing what progress the truth has made within the last twenty years; and a man like Landor knows that at every future step it must derive fresh strength from his writings. He has pandered to no corruption, he has flattered no fashion; his efforts are all directed to the uprooting of error and the spread of sound reason; and, therefore, the more the latter prevails the more his writings will grow into the spirit of the age. There are those who say that Landor’s writings never can be popular. They are greatly mistaken. There is a large reading class, every day becoming larger, in which, were they made cheap enough, they would find the most lively acceptation. It is the class of the uncorrupted people itself. His opinions, and his manly, uncompromising spirit, are just what fall on the popular spirit like showers in summer. They are drank in with a thirsty avidity, and give at once life and solace. In this respect I do not hesitate to place them among the very first of the age.

  Having proposed to himself to be a labourer in literature, Mr. Landor’s first care has been to make himself master of his implements. His success has been signally great…. His language is finished, yet perfectly natural. Although always visibly correct, and always terse, it is still free, never stiff, never pedantic. His words are singularly choice; and they seem as if they came unsought for, and from every department of our composite language. His composition has less of the air of a student’s—less of the disciple’s of any school—less of the professed writer’s, than that of any other recent English author we can call to mind. For the most part, it is that of one intent merely on uttering his thoughts, which it does after no set or favourite form, but in a varying manner, suited to the matter to be delivered. And with a most remarkable readiness, his diction takes the character of the ideas to be expressed, doing its work always promptly, always effectively, and always with ease, sometimes with admirable gracefulness and beauty. This is high praise, but well deserved, and sincere as great.

  Look at Walter Savage Landor! No one can doubt that he is intensely and essentially a poet, and that his prose and verse contain little bursts of glorious poetic music. But they are brief; they are broken; they are not sustained; they are perpetually intermingled with harsh and harrow-like paragraphs, and both his prose and verse conjoin in proving that he never could have elaborated any long, linked, and continuous harmony.

  No style surely bears such testimony as his, by its calmness and proportion, its freedom and its severity, to the influence of the best authors upon him, and to his own power of coping with them and mastering them. It is, moreover, adapted to this century, no copy of Taylor or Milton’s, of South’s or Addison’s, though benefitted and enriched by them all; still more by his classical reading, not corrupted nor made the least pedantic by it. His style is never obtrusive, seldom leads you to think about it, but it always suggests a man of whose mind it must be the utterance. The dialogue was the rightly chosen instrument of such a mind. He required it that he might present the different aspects of his own character; it kept up the balance of powers, each of which was always tending to excess.

  More than any he reminds of Shakespeare in dramatic power; of Plato, in his mastery of dialogue; in epic force, of Æschylus. He seems to have been one of the demigods, cast down, out of place, out of his time, restless ever, and indignant at his destiny,—

“Heaven’s exile straying from the orb of light.”

  His prose writings are better known than his poetry; yet it is probably his poetry that is the most secure basis of his reputation. His crowning excellence is sublimity of conception: the character of Count Julian is his masterpiece, and it is ranked by so sober a judge as De Quincey with the Satan of Milton and the Prometheus of Æschylus. In his “Imaginary Conversations,” as was to be expected from so eager an egotist, dramatic exhibition of character is no part of their excellence. Some critics, indeed, profess to see a great deal of character in some of the dialogues. But the concession is made that it is not impossible that in many cases he first wrote the opinions and then looked about for a passably consistent mouthpiece; and in many cases personages are credited with opinions that they are very unlikely to have entertained. The “Conversations” are interesting not from their dramatic propriety or significance, but as the vehicles of Landor’s own opinions. He does not attempt to imitate the style of literary interlocutors; in the dialogue between Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, Greville talks the language of Sidney’s “Arcadia,” and Sidney the language of Walter Landor. In his prose style two points of excellence may be singled out—the aphoristic force of his general propositions, and the felicitous force of his imagery. In the opinion of many, his style has too much force. In addition to the vigor and occasional vehemence of the meaning, the minute observer will remark that the words are studiously chosen for emphatic articulation, containing an unusual proportion of energetic “labials,” a choice doubtless apt and consistent, but, like all obtrusive arts, liable to be overdone.

  Nowhere in the range of the English language are the glory and happiness of moderation of mind more nobly preached and powerfully illustrated than in the writings of this most intemperate man; nowhere is the sacredness of the placid life more hallowed and honoured than in the utterances of this tossed and troubled spirit; nowhere are heroism and self-sacrifice and forgiveness more eloquently adored than by this intense and fierce individuality, which seemed unable to forget for an instant its own claims, its own wrongs, its own fancied superiority over all its fellow-men…. His style is so natural an outgrowth of a rich imaginative mind, and so clear a representative of thought, that its study is not likely to lead to any servile imitation, while it conveys the most distinct impression of the charm and power of Form. Abounding in strong, even passionate diction, it is never vague or convulsive; magniloquent as declamation can demand, it is never pompous or turgid; humorous throughout, it avoids contortions and abhors caricature. In strange contradiction to the temper of the writer, its chief characteristic is self-command, and it bears a weight or paradox with as much ease and dignity as ordinary writing its lightest commonplace.

  Another flaring beacon of the rock, on which great wits are often wrecked for want of a little kindly culture of unselfishness, is Walter Savage Landor, the most finished master of style, perhaps, that ever used the English tongue; but a person at the same time so imperiously wilful, and so majestically cross-grained, that, with all his polish, style and pointed thought, he was constantly living on the verge of insanity.

  As an artist he was, like a maple, swift of development, but strong to hold it as an elm or oak; while many poets have done their best work under thirty, and ten years after have been old or dead, the very noon-tide of Landor’s faculties was later than his fiftieth year. We could not regard him as a tyro, had he died, like Keats, at twenty-five, not as a jaded old man, dying, as he did, at ninety; for he was as conservative in youth as he ever grew to be, and as fiery and forward-looking in age as in youth. He attained the summit early, and moved along an elevated plateau, forbearing as he grew older to descend the further side, and at death flung off somewhere into the ether, still facing the daybreak and worshipped by many rising stars.

  No man ever lived whose life seemed so utterly beyond any law but his own caprice; no man ever wrote whose course of thought upon all great subjects was more strictly subordinated to universal law. In his life he was the ungoverned Berserker of the Scandinavian sagas; in his writings he is the sage and philosopher who might have given lessons to Plato or Cicero.

  If ever that sovereign power of perfection was made manifest in human words, such words assuredly were his, whether English or Latin, who wrote that epitaph on the martyred patriots of Spain, as far exceeding in its majesty of beauty the famous inscription for the Spartan three-hundred as the law of the love of liberty exceeds all human laws of mere obedience; who gave back Iphigenia to Agamemnon forever, and Vipsania for an hour of Tiberius. Before the breath of such a spirit as speaks in his transcendent words, the spirit of a loyal-minded man is bowed down as it were at a touch and melted into burning tears, to be again raised up by it and filled and kindled and expanded into something—or he dreams so—of a likeness for the moment to itself.

  Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little, as Walter Savage Landor. Of all celebrated authors, he has hitherto been one of the least popular. Nevertheless he is among the most striking figures in the history of English literature; striking alike by his character and his powers…. The place occupied by Landor among English men of letters is a place apart. He wrote on many subjects and in many forms, and was strong both in imagination and criticism. He was equally master of Latin and English, and equally at home in prose and verse. He cannot properly be associated with any given school, or, indeed, with any given epoch of our literature, as epochs are usually counted, but stands alone, alike by the character of his mind and by the tenour and circumstances of his life…. Everything he says must be his own, and nothing but his own. On the other hand, it is no part of Landor’s originality to provoke attention, as many even of illustrious writers have done, by emphasis or singularity of style. Arbitrary and vehement beyond other men in many of his thoughts, in their utterance he is always sober and decorous. He delivers himself of whatever is in his mind with an air, to borrow an expression of his own, “majestically sedate.”

  Landor was not one of our modern dressing-gown-and-slippers kind of authors. He always took pains to be splendid, and preferred stately magnificence to chatty familiarity.

  To some of us Landor’s imagination is not only inferior in kind but poverty-stricken in degree; his creative faculty is limited by the reflection that its one achievement is Landor’s; his claim to consideration as a dramatic writer is negatived by the fact that, poignant as are the situations with which he loved to deal, he was apparently incapable of perceiving their capacities: inasmuch as he has failed completely and logically to develop a single one of them; inasmuch, too, as he has never once succeeded in conceiving, much less in picturing, such a train of conflicting emotions as any one of the complications from which he starts might be supposed to generate. To many there is nothing Greek about his dramatic work except the absence of stage directions; and to these that quality of “Landorian abruptness” which seems to Mr. Sidney Colvin to excuse so many of its shortcomings is identical with a certain sort of what in men of lesser mould is called stupidity.

  In Landor’s eight volumes there are more fine thoughts, more wise apothegms, than in any other discursive author’s works in English literature; but they do not tell on the mind. They bloom like flowers in their gardens, but they crown no achievement. At the end, no cause is advanced, no goal is won…. His prose is rather the monologue of a seer. In reading his works one feels somewhat as if sitting at the feet of Coleridge. Landor has the presence that abashes companions. His manner of speech is more dignified, more ceremonial, his enunciation is more resonant, his accent more exquisite, than belong to the man of the world. He silences his readers by the mere impossibility of interrupting with a question so noble and smooth-sliding a current of words. The style is a sort of modern Miltonic; it has the suggestion of the pulpit divine in Hooker, the touch of formal artificiality that characterizes the first good English prose.

  His own literary quality is to a great extent independent of the quality of his subjects, but none the less real for that. Like other original writers, he has to create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. Judicial criticism has often affirmed his obvious faults, mentioning his merits parenthetically. It is the subtle merits that need affirmation, for it is by them that he differs from other writers. By them he may, in the long run, come to be known. For, whereas Dickens, George Eliot, and Browning show signs of losing, from lack of a sense of form, the pre-eminence which their strength seemed to command, Landor is perhaps gaining recognition as the possessor of a faculty which in them was subordinate. Not that he is gaining many readers nor that his writings can all be read by anybody. His best is unmatched in its kind, however; not to know it is to be a loser. Its chance in the struggle for existence rests on the likelihood of there being in future generations a few men with Emerson’s unjaded taste for “pure literature.”

  I have sometimes wondered whether Walter Savage Landor did not really meditate writing an historical novel at some time during the evolution of the “Imaginary Conversations.” More than one work of the kind, and assuredly of the highest order, must have presented itself to his mind, since he possessed in a supreme degree the power most necessary to the historical novelist, that of seizing the dramatic points in the lives of historical personages and of creating splendid dramatic dialogues without at any time compromising undoubted facts. In other words, he knew how to combine the romantic and the real in such true and just proportions as to demonstrate clearly that they may and should go hand in hand.

  Born in the decade which gave us Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Scott, at his maturity, when the fervid generation of Keats, Shelley and Byron were in full tide of song, Landor was as secluded and solitary as a mountain tarn. His long life of well-nigh ninety years included the entire Romantic movement of modern times. He stood in relations of personal friendship with the English poets who gave a new impulse and direction to the national imagination; he was a young man when the Schlegels, Novalis, and Tieck were recalling the enchantments of the Middle Ages in Germany; he was at the full maturity of his power when Lamartine published the “Meditations” and Victor Hugo routed the French Classicists on the stage of the Theatre Français with his drama of “Hermani.” Through this tumultuous age, so intensely modern in spirit that for the moment the antique seemed wholly obliterated, Landor preserved a calmness, a moderation, a self-possession that were born of hourly companionship with a world of classical repose and strength. To study him is to get in clear perspective the proportions of his contemporaries, and to feel what is easily apprehended but not so easily described—the difference between the Classical and the Romantic manner.

  Landor is uneven in the matter of unity. He can keep severely to one topic, but he forgets. He will begin an important paragraph on, say, Laura’s decreasing coldness towards Petrarca, and, after illustrating this point by a remarkably inapposite account of the lady being kissed at a ball by Charles of Luxemburg, will proceed to tell you in the same paragraph of Petrarca’s travels and visits in the following summer. Generally, however, Landor’s frequent digressions proceed by whole paragraphs. In the matter of proportion Landor has very considerable merits, though by no means the highest. He pays little attention to proportion by bulk; but he uses the semicolon and the period with great skill to secure right distribution of emphasis. Here, however, the principle of euphony often interferes. No author ever surpassed Landor in such tricks of melody as introducing at the end of a resounding period a very brief colon clause for cadence. These skillful variations sometimes misplace the thought emphasis. When, however, the two principles coincide in the application, the effect is perfect. The felicitous combination occurs oftener in the short than in the long paragraphs. In the longer ones we sometimes feel that the writer is caring nothing for precision—only for the infinite variety of prose modulation which he himself describes—that “amplification of harmonies, of which even the best and most varied poetry admits but few.” Landor’s style is intuitive and segregating; the incoherence of it is its weakest point.

  It is not Landor’s influence, by any means, which is felt in the random dialogues of to-day. He is an author more praised than loved, more talked about than read, and his unapproachable delicacy and distinction are far removed from all efforts of facial imitation.

  Landor is the great solitary of English literature. So strangely were the elements mixed in him, that, with many of the qualities that endear men to their fellows, to keep on terms with society was too severe a tax upon his temper. Nor are the friends of the author much more numerous than were those of the man. He was content to keep his way apart in life and content too that the path he trod as a writer should be little traveled. “I shall dine late,” he said, “but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select.” They are few and select, and Landor, who was not a man of his time, will never be the people’s man. At an epoch, when the cold fires of the classic ritual of eighteenth-century literature began to pale before the passion and colour and mystery of the mediæval revival, with singular indifference to contemporary fashion he began to speak English with a purer classic accent than had yet been heard in the modern world…. Without achieving success Landor by reason of his style takes undisputed place among the masters of English prose. The majestic march, the solemn cadences and sustained harmonies of his Roman period are among the golden joys of the student of literature. Landor’s was the art of the statuary. His instinct was for that form of excellence which consists in firmly outlined intellectual drawing, and “words that fit the thing.” To achieve distinction in this manner is to be subject to no changes of fashion and to be numbered among those in whose quiet gardens, as in the courts of some ancient college, the artist loves to linger, to recall and meditate the past, secure from the bustle of the crowd and the faces of anxious men.

  Supreme genius Landor had not. His brain was not a great brain, and he did not possess the exquisite alertness to his own weaknesses, or the stubborn knack of confinement to things suitable to him, which some natures much smaller than the great ones have enjoyed. But he had the faculty of elaborate style—of style elaborated by a careful education of the best models and vivified by a certain natural gift—as no one since the seventeenth century had had it, and as no one except Mr. Ruskin and the late Mr. Pater has had since. Also, he was as much wider in his range and more fertile in his production than Mr. Pater as he was more solidly grounded on the best models than Mr. Ruskin. Where Landor is quite unique is in the apparent indifference with which he was able to direct this gift of his into the channels of prose and poetry—a point on which he parts company from both the writers to whom he has been compared, and in which his only analogue, so far as I am able to judge, is Victor Hugo. The style of no Englishman is so unlike in the two harmonies as is that of Landor. And it is perhaps not surprising that, this being the case, he shows at his best in prose when he tries long pieces, in verse when he tries short ones.

  He is stiff in opinion, not because his vision of truth is so dazzling, but because he has the bull-dog’s instinct of hanging-on to whatever comes beneath the teeth. “Mama says so,” remarked the once famous child in “Punch;” “and if Mamma says so it is so, even if it isn’t!” That was the opinion of Walter Savage Landor about Walter Savage Landor’s opinions—even when he recommended the Greeks to fight the Turks with bows and arrows instead of firearms. Let us be thankful that a certain genius makes them not too seldom right and that a classical style allied with a strong personality makes them always interesting. In no intellectual quality, perhaps, can he be called great; but he has written some of the best prose in the English language.

  The heroic ideals of Landor’s imagination, derived in part from communion with the greatest natural aristocrats of all time, helped to save his verse and his prose from the violence and egotism which often confused his life, and which often cleared away as suddenly, like clouds before the wind and sun. He toiled indeed at his art with an intemperate rage that exhausted him; but it was to produce a form of marmoreal purity and permanence, to discover the laws and the lines of ideal majesty or ideal grace.

  Whose noble monumental style, far mere truly and successfully Greek than his attempted Hellenisings in verse, has reconciled many a reader to as perversely ill-sorted a set of political and literary opinions as was ever begotten of the union of Tory prejudices and Jacobin theories in the same person, and to as arrogantly defiant a dogmatism as over-weening pride of intellect ever brought to their support.