Anti-Landor.
To the many, Landor has always been more or less unapproachable, and has
always seemed more or less shadowy and unreal. To begin with, he wrote
for himself and a few others, and principally for himself. Then, he
wrote waywardly and unequally as well as selfishly; he published pretty
much at random; the bulk of his work is large; and the majority has
passed him by for writers more accessible and work less freakish and more
comprehensible. It is probable too that even among those who, inspired
by natural temerity or the intemperate curiosity of the general reader,
have essayed his conquest and set out upon what has been described as
'the Adventure of the Seven Volumes which are Seven Valleys of Dry
Bones,' but few have returned victorious. Of course the Seven Volumes
are a world. But (it is objected) the world is peculiar in pattern,
abounding in antres vast and desarts idle, in gaps and precipices and
'manifest solutions of continuity,' and enveloped in an atmosphere which
ordinary lungs find now too rare and now too dense and too anodyne.
Moreover, it is peopled chiefly with abstractions: bearing noble and
suggestive names but all surprisingly alike in stature and feature, all
more or less incapable of sustained emotion and even of logical argument,
all inordinately addicted to superb generalities and a kind of monumental
skittishness, all expressing themselves in a style whose principal
characteristic is a magnificent monotony, and all apparently the outcome
of a theory that to be wayward is to be creative, that human interest is
a matter of apophthegms and oracular sentences, and that axiomatic and
dramatic are identical qualities and convertible terms. This is the
opinion of those adventurers in whom defeat has generated a sense of
injury and an instinct of antagonism. Others less fortunate still have
found Landor a continent of dulness and futility--have come to consider
the Seven Volumes as so many aggregations of tedium. Such experiences
are one-sided and partial no doubt; and considered from a certain point
of view they seem worthless enough. But they exist, and they are in some
sort justified. Landor, when all is said, remains a writers' writer; and
for my part I find it impossible not to feel a certain sympathy with them
that hesitate to accept him for anything else.
His Drama.
Again, to some of us Lander'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; 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.