English Lands Letters and Kings 14

English Lands Letters and Kings 14

Landor’s Domesticities._

 

Meanwhile, we have a sorry story to tell of Landor’s home belongings.

There is a storm brewing in that beautiful villa of Fiesole. Children have

been born to the house, and he pets them, fondles them--seems to love them

absorbingly. Little notelets which pass when they are away, at Naples, at

Rome, are full of pleasantest paternal banter and yearning. But those

children have run wild and are as vagrant as the winds.

 

The home compass has no fixed bearings and points all awry--the mother,

never having sympathy with the work which had tasked Landor in those

latter years, has, too, her own outside vanities and a persistent

petulance, which breaks out into rasping speech when Jupiter flings his

thunder-bolts. So Landor, in a strong rage of determination, breaks away:

turns his back on wife and children--providing for them, however,

generously--and goes to live again at Bath, in England.

 

For twenty-three years he stays there, away from his family (remembering,

perhaps, in self-exculpating way, how Shakespeare had once done much the

same), rambling over his old haunts, writing new verse, revamping old

books, petting his Pomeranian dog, entertaining admiring guests, fuming

and raving when crossed. He was more dangerously loud, too, than of old;

and at last is driven away, to escape punishment for some scathing libels

into which a storm of what he counted righteous rage has betrayed him. It

must have been a pitiful thing to see this old, white-haired man--past

eighty now--homeless, as good as childless, skulking, as it were, in

London, just before sailing for the Continent,--appearing suddenly at

Forster’s house, seated upon his bed there, with Dickens in presence,

mumbling about Latin poetry and its flavors!

 

He finds his way to Genoa, then to Florence, then to the Fiesole Villa

once more; but it would seem as if there were no glad greetings on either

side; and in a few days estrangement comes again, and he returns to

Florence. Twice or thrice more those visits to Fiesole are repeated, in

the vague hope, it would seem, floating in the old man’s mind, that by

some miracle of heaven, aspects would change there--or perhaps in him--and

black grow white, and gloom sail away under some new blessed gale from

Araby. But it does never come; nor ever the muddied waters of that home

upon the Florentine hills flow pure and bright again.

 

 

_Final Exile and Death._

 

He goes back--eighty-five now--toothless, and trembling under weight of

years and wranglings, to the Via Nunziatina, in Florence; he has no means

now--having despoiled himself for the benefit of those living at his

Villa of Fiesole, who will not live with him, or he with them; he is

largely dependent upon a brother in England. He passes a summer, in these

times, with the American sculptor Story. He receives occasional wandering

friends; has a new pet of a dog to fondle.

 

There is always a trail of worshipping women and poetasters about him to

the very last; but the bad odor of his Bath troubles has followed him;

Normanby, the British Minister, will give him no recognition; but there is

no bending, no flinching in this great, astute, imperious, headstrong,

ill-balanced creature. Indeed, he carries now under his shock of white

hair, and in his tottering figure, a stock of that coarse virility which

has distinguished him always--which for so many has its charm, and which

it is hard to reconcile with the tender things of which he was

capable;--for instance, that interview of Agamemnon and Iphigenia--so

cunningly, delicately, and so feelingly told--as if the story were all his

own, and had no Greek root--other than what found hold in the greensward

of English Warwickshire. And I close our talk of Landor, by citing this:

Iphigenia has heard her doom (you know the story); she must die by the

hands of the priest--or, the ships, on which her father’s hopes and his

fortunes rest, cannot sail. Yet, she pleads;--there may have been mistakes

in interpreting the cruel oracle,--there may be hope still,--

 

“The Father placed his cheek upon her head

And tears dropt down it; but, the king of men

Replied not: Then the maiden spoke once more,--

‘O, Father, says’t thou nothing? Hear’st thou not

_Me_, whom thou ever hast, until this hour,

Listened to--fondly; and awakened me

To hear my voice amid the voice of birds

When it was inarticulate as theirs,

And the down deadened it within the nest.’

He moved her gently from him, silent still:

And this, and this alone, brought tears from her

Although she saw fate nearer: then, with sighs,--

‘I thought to have laid down my hair before

Benignant Artemis, and not have dimmed

Her polisht altar with my virgin blood;

I thought to have selected the white flowers

To please the Nymphs, and to have asked of each

By name, and with no sorrowful regret,

Whether, since both my parents willed the change,

I might at Hymen’s feet bend my clipt brow,

And--(after those who mind us girls the most)

Adore our own Athena, that she would

Regard me mildly with her azure eyes;

But--Father! to see you no more, and see

Your love, O Father! go, ere I am gone.’

Gently he moved her off, and drew her back,

Bending his lofty head far over hers,

And the dark depths of nature heaved and burst:

He turned away: not far, but silent still:

She now first shuddered; for in him--so nigh,

So long a silence seemed the approach of death

And like it. Once again, she raised her voice,--

‘O Father! if the ships are now detained

And all your vows move not the Gods above

When the knife strikes me, there will be one prayer

The less to them; and, purer can there be

Any, or more fervent, than the daughter’s prayer

For her dear father’s safety and success?’

A groan that shook him, shook not his Resolve.

An aged man now entered, and without

One word, stept slowly on, and took the wrist

Of the pale maiden. She looked up and saw

The fillet of the priest, and calm cold eyes:

Then turned she, where her parent stood and cried,--

‘O, Father! grieve no more! the ships can sail!’”

 

When we think of Landor, let us forget his wrangles--forget his wild

impetuosities--forget his coarsenesses, and his sad, lonely death;

and--instead--keep in mind, if we can, that sweet picture I have given

you.

 

 

_Prose of Leigh Hunt._

 

It was some two years before George IV. came to the Regency, and at nearly

the same date with the establishment of Murray’s _Quarterly_, that Mr.

Leigh Hunt,[50] in company with his brother John Hunt, set up a paper

called the _Examiner_--associated in later days with the strong names of

Fonblanque and Forster. This paper was of a stiffly Whiggish and radical

sort, and very out-spoken--so that when George IV., as Regent, seemed to

turn his back on old Whig friends, and show favors to the Tories (as he

did), Mr. Leigh Hunt wrote such sneering and abusive articles about the

Regent that he was prosecuted, fined, and clapped into prison, where he

stayed two years. They were lucky two years for him--making reputation for

his paper and for himself; his friends and family dressed up his prison

room with flowers (he loved overmuch little luxuries of that sort);

Byron, Moore, Godwin, and the rest all came to see him; and there he

caught the first faint breezes of that popular applause which blew upon

him in a desultory and rather languid way for a good many years

afterward--not wholly forsaking him when he had grown white-haired, and

had brought his delicate, fine, but somewhat feeble pen into the modern

courts of criticism.

 

I do not suppose that anybody in our day goes into raptures over the

writings of Leigh Hunt; nevertheless, we must bring him upon our

record--all the more since there was American blood in him. His father,

Isaac Hunt, was born in the Barbadoes, and studied in Philadelphia; in the

latter city, Dr. Franklin and Tom Paine used to be visitors at his

grandfather’s house. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Hunt’s father,

who--notwithstanding his Philadelphia wife--was a bitter loyalist, went to

England--his departure very much quickened by some threats of punishing

his aggressive Toryism. He appears in England as a clergyman--ultimately

wedded to Unitarian doctrines; finding his way sometimes to the studio of

Benjamin West--talking over Pennsylvania affairs with that famous artist,

and encountering there, as it chanced, John Trumbull, a student in

painting--who in after years bequeathed an art-gallery to Yale College. It

happens, too, that this Colonel Trumbull, in 1812, when the American war

was in progress, was suspected as a spy, and escaped grief mainly by the

intervention of Isaac Hunt.

 

The young Hunt began early to write--finding his way into journalism of

all sorts; his name associated sooner or later with _The News_, and

dramatic critiques; with the _Examiner_, the _Reflector_, the _Indicator_,

the _Companion_, and the _Liberal_--for which latter he dragged his family

down into Italy at the instance of Byron or Shelley, or both. That

_Liberal_ was intended to astonish people and make the welkin ring; but

the Italian muddle was a bad one, the _Liberal_ going under, and an ugly

quarrel setting in; Hunt revenging himself afterward by writing _Lord

Byron and his Contemporaries_,--a book he ultimately regretted: he was

never strong enough to make his bitterness respected. Honeyed words became

him better; and these he dealt out--wave upon wave--on all sorts of

unimportant themes. Thus, he writes upon “Sticks”; and again upon

“Maid-servants”; again on “Bees and Butterflies” (which is indeed very

pretty); and again “Upon getting up of a cold morning”--in which he

compassionates those who are haled out of their beds by “harpy-footed

furies”--discourses on his own experience and sees his own breath rolling

forth like smoke from a chimney, and the windows frosted over.

 

“Then the servant comes in: ‘It is very cold this morning, is it

not?’ ‘Very cold, sir.’ ‘Very cold, indeed, isn’t it?’ ‘Very cold,

indeed, sir.’ ‘More than usually so, isn’t it, even for this

weather?’ ‘Why, sir, I think it _is_, sir.’… And then the hot water

comes: ‘And is it quite hot? And isn’t it too hot?’ And what ‘an

unnecessary and villainous custom this is of shaving.’”

 

Whereupon he glides off, in words that flow as easily as water from a

roof--into a disquisition upon flowing beards--instancing Cardinal Bembo

and Michelangelo, Plato and the Turks. Listen again to what he has to say

in his _Indicator_ upon “A Coach”:--

 

“It is full of cushions and comfort; elegantly colored inside and

out; rich yet neat; light and rapid, yet substantial. The horses

seem proud to draw it. The fat and fair-wigged coachman lends his

sounding lash, his arm only in action, and that but little; his body

well set with its own weight. The footman, in the pride of his

nonchalance, holding by the straps behind, and glancing down

sideways betwixt his cocked hat and neckcloth, standing swinging

from East to West upon his springy toes. The horses rush along

amidst their glancing harness. Spotted dogs leap about them, barking

with a princely superfluity of noise. The hammer cloth trembles

through all its fringe. The paint flashes in the sun.”

 

Nothing can be finer--if one likes that sort of fineness. We follow such a

writer with no sense of his having addressed our intellectual nature, but

rather with a sense of pleasurable regalement to our nostrils by some high

wordy perfume.

 

Hawthorne, in _Our Old Home_, I think, tells us that even to extreme age,

the boyishness of the man’s nature shone through and made Hunt’s speech

like the chirp of a bird; he never tired of gathering his pretty roses of

words. It is hard to think of such a man doing serious service in the role

of radical journalist--as if he _could_ speak dangerous things! And yet,

who can tell? They say Robespierre delighted in satin facings to his

coat, and was never without his _boutonnière_.