English Lands Letters and Kings 13

English Lands Letters and Kings 13

“Never was I impatient to receive

What _any_ man could give me. When a friend

Gave me my due, I took it, and no more,

Serenely glad, because that friend was pleased.

I seek not many; many seek not me.

If there are few now seated at my board,

I pull no children’s hair because they munch

Gilt gingerbread, the figured and the sweet,

Or wallow in the innocence of whey;

Give _me_ wild boar, the buck’s broad haunch give _me_,

And wine that time has mellowed, even as time

Mellows the warrior hermit in his cell.”[46]

 

Such verse does not invite a large following, nor did the man. Pugnacious,

tyrannic, loud-mouthed, setting the world’s and the Church’s rubrics at

defiance; yet weighing language to the last jot and tittle of its

significance, and--odd-whiles--putting little tendernesses of thought and

far-reaching poetic aspirations into such cinctures of polished verse--so

jewelled, so compact, so classic, so fine--that their music will last and

be admired as long, I think, as English speech lasts. Apart from all this

man wrote, there is a strange, half-tragic interest in his life, which

will warrant me in telling you more of him than I have told of many whose

books are more prized by you.

 

He was the son of a Dr. Landor, of Warwick, in middle England, who by

reason of two adroit marriages was a man of fortune, and so secured

eventually a very full purse to the poet, who if he had depended only on

the sale of his literary wares, would have starved. Language was always

young Landor’s hobby; and he came, by dint of good schooling, to such

dexterity in the use of Latin, as to write it in verse or prose with

nearly the same ease as English. He loved out-of-door pursuits in boyhood

and all his life; was greatly accomplished, his biographer says, in

fishing--especially with a cast-net; and of the prey that sometimes came

into such net there is this frolicsome record:

 

“In youth ’twas there I used to scare

A whirring bird, or scampering hare,

And leave my book within a nook

Where alders lean above the brook,

To walk beyond the third mill-pond

And meet a maiden fair and fond

Expecting me beneath a tree

Of shade for two, but not for three.

Ah, my old Yew, far out of view,

Why must I bid you both adieu?”[47]

 

At Oxford he was a marked man for his cleverness and for his audacities;

these last brought him to grief there, and going home upon his

rustication, he quarrelled with his father. Thereafter we find him in

London, where he publishes his first little booklet of poems (1795); only

twenty then; counted a fierce radical; detesting old George III. with his

whole heart; admiring the rebel George Washington and declaring it; loving

the French, too, with their liberty and fraternity song, until it was

silenced by the cannonading of Napoleon; thenceforward, he counts that

people a nation of “monkeys, fit only to be chained.”

 

But Landor never loved London. We find him presently wandering by the

shores of Wales, and among its mountains. Doubtless he takes his cast-net

with him; the names of Ianthé and Ioné decorate occasional verses; a

certain Rose Aylmer he encounters, too, who loans him a book (by Clara

Reeve), from a sketch in which he takes hint for his wild, weird poem of

_Gebir_, his first long poem--known to very few--perhaps not worth the

knowing. It is blind in its drift; war and pomp and passion in it--ending

with a poisoned cup; and contrasting with these, such rural beatitudes as

may be conjured under Afric skies, with tender love-breezes, ending in

other beatitudes in coral palaces beneath the sea. This, at any rate, is

the phantasmic outline which a reading leaves upon my own memory. Perhaps

another reader may be happier.

 

That shadowy Rose Aylmer, through whom the suggestion for the poem came,

was the real daughter of Lord Aylmer, of the near Welsh country; what

Landor’s intimacy with her may have been, in its promise or its reach, we

do not know; but we do know that when she died, somewhat later and in a

far country, the poet gave her name embalmment in those wonderful little

verses, which poor Charles Lamb, it is said, in his later days, would

repeat over and over and over, never tiring of the melody and the pathos.

Here they are:--

 

“Ah, what avails the sceptred race,

Ah, what the form divine!

What--every virtue, every grace!

Rose Aylmer, all were thine.

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,

A night of memories and of sighs

I consecrate to thee!”

 

Meantime, growing into a tempestuous love for the wild Welsh country, he

bargains for a great estate, far up in a valley which opens down upon the

larger valley in which lies Abergavenny; and being rich now by reason of

his father’s death, parts with his beautiful ancestral properties in the

Warwickshire region, lavishing a large portion of the sales-money upon the

savagery of the new estate in Wales. He plants, he builds, he plays the

monarch in those solitudes. He marries, too, while this mountain passion

is on him, a young girl of French or Swiss extraction--led like a lamb

into the lion’s grasp. But the first Welsh quarrel of this

poet-monarch--who was severely classic, and who fed himself all his life

through on the thunder-bolts of Jupiter--was with his neighbors; next with

his workmen; then with his tenants; then the magistrates; last with

everybody; and in a passion of disgust, he throws down his walls, turns

astray his cattle, lets loose his mountain tarns, and leaving behind him

the weltering wreck of his half-built home, goes over with his wife to

Jersey, off the coast of Normandy. There she, poor, tired, frighted,

worried bird--maybe with a little of the falcon in her--would stay; _he_

would not. So he dashes on incontinently--deserting her, and planting

himself in mid-France at the old city of Tours, where he devotes himself

to study.

 

This first family tiff, however, gets its healing, and--his wife joining

him--they go to Como, where Southey (1817) paid them a visit; this poet

had been one of the first and few admirers of _Gebir_, which fact softened

the way to very much of mutual and somewhat over-strained praises between

these two.[48] From Como Landor went to Pisa--afterward to Florence, his

home thenceforth for very many years; first in the town proper and then in

a villa at Fiesole from which is seen that wondrous view--none can forget

who have beheld it--of the valley, which seems a plain--of the nestling

city, with its great Brunelleschi dome, its arrow-straight belfry of

Giotto, its quaint tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, its cypress sentinels on

the Boboli heights, its River Arno shining and winding, and stealing away

seaward from the amphitheatre of hills--on whose slopes are dotted white

convents, sleeping in the sun, and villas peeping out from their cloakings

of verdure, and the gray shimmer of olive orchards.

 

 

_Landor in Italy._

 

It was in Florence that Landor wrote the greater part of those _Imaginary

Conversations_ 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.

 

The conversations are just what their name implies--the talk of learned,

or distinguished men, on such topics as they were supposed to be most

familiar with; all _imagined_, and set forth by the brain of Landor, who

took a strange delight in thus playing with the souls of other men and

making them the puppets of his will. One meets in his pages Roger Ascham

and Lady Jane Grey, Milton and Andrew Marvel, and Achilles and Helena;

then we are transported from Mount Ida to the scene of a homely colloquy

between Washington and Franklin--about monarchy and Republicanism. Again

we have Leofric and Godiva telling their old story with a touching

dramatic interest; and can listen--if we will--to long and dullish dispute

between Dr. Johnson and Horne Tooke, about Language and its Laws; from

this--in which Landor was always much interested--we slip to the

Philo-Russianism of a talk between Peter the Great and Alexis. 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. Of course there is no logical continuity--no full exposition of a

creed, or a faith, or a philosophy. 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.[49] There are beauties of __EXPRESSION__ that fascinate one;

there are sentences so big with meaning as to bring you to sudden pause;

there are wearisome chapters about the balance of French verselets, in

which he sets up the poor Abbé Delille on rhetorical stilts--only to pelt

him down; there are page-long blotches of crude humor, and irrelevant

muddy tales, that you wish were out. As sample of his manner, I give one

or two passages at random. Speaking of Boileau, he says:--

 

“In Boileau there is really more of diffuseness than of brevity [he

loves thus to slap a popular belief straight in the face]; few

observe this, because [Boileau] abounds in short sentences; and few

are aware that sentences may be very short, and the writer very

prolix; as half a dozen stones rising out of a brook give the

passenger more trouble than a plank across it.” [He abounds in

short, pert similes of this sort which seem almost to carry an

argument in them.]

 

[Again] “Caligula spoke justly and admirably when he compared the

sentences of Seneca _to sand without lime_.”

 

[And once more] “He must be a bad writer, or, however, a very

indifferent one, to whom there are no inequalities. The plants of

such table-land are diminutive and never worth gathering.… The

vigorous mind has mountains to climb and valleys to repose in. Is

there any sea without its shoal? On that which the poet navigates,

he rises intrepidly as the waves riot around him, and sits

composedly as they subside.…”

 

“Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity?

Raise up the Vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those

sylvan creeks and harbors in which the imagination watches while the

soul reposes, those recesses in which the gods partook of the

weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments of the gods.”

 

The great learning of Landor and his vast information, taken in connection

with his habits of self-indulgence (often of indolence), assure us that he

must have had the rare talent, and the valuable one, of riddling

books--that is, of skimming over them--with such wonderfully quick

exercise of wit and judgment as to segregate the valuable from the

valueless parts. ’Tis not a bad quality; nor is it necessarily (as many

suppose) attended by superficiality. The superficial man does indeed skim

things; but he pounces as squarely and surely upon the bad as upon the

good; he works by mechanical process and progression--here a sentence and

there a sentence; but the man who can race through a book well (as did Dr.

Johnson and Landor), carries to the work--in his own genius for

observation and quick discernment--a chemical mordant that bites and shows

warning effervescence, and a signal to stay, only where there is something strong to bite.