WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR was born on the 30th of January, 1775, and died at
the age of eighty-nine in September, 1864. He was the eldest son of a
physician at Warwick, and his second name, Savage, was the family name of
his mother, who owned two estates in Warwickshire—Ipsley Court and
Tachbrook—and had a reversionary interest in Hughenden Manor,
Buckinghamshire. To this property, worth £80,000, her eldest son was
heir. That eldest son was born a poet, had a generous nature, and an
ardent impetuous temper. The temper, with its obstinate claim of
independence, was too much for the head master of Rugby, who found in
Landor the best writer of Latin verse among his boys, but one ready to
fight him over difference of opinion about a Latin quantity. In 1793
Landor went to Trinity College, Oxford. He had been got rid of at Rugby
as unmanageable. After two years at Oxford, he was rusticated; thereupon
he gave up his chambers, and refused to return. Landor’s father, who had
been much tried by his unmanageable temper, then allowed him £150 a year
to live with as he pleased, away from home. He lived in South Wales—at
Swansea, Tenby, or elsewhere—and he sometimes went home to Warwick for
short visits. In South Wales he gave himself to full communion with the
poets and with Nature, and he fastened with particular enthusiasm upon
Milton. Lord Aylmer, who lived near Tenby, was among his friends. Rose
Aylmer, whose name he has made through death imperishable, by linking it
with a few lines of perfect music, {6} lent Landor “The Progress of
Romance,” a book published in 1785, by Clara Reeve, in which he found the
description of an Arabian tale that suggested to him his poem of “Gebir.”
Landor began “Gebir” in Latin, then turned it into English, and then
vigorously condensed what he had written. The poem was first published
at Warwick as a sixpenny pamphlet in the year 1798, when Landor’s age was
twenty-three. Robert Southey was among the few who bought it, and he
first made known its power. In the best sense of the phrase, “Gebir” was
written in classical English, not with a search for pompous words of
classical origin to give false dignity to style, but with strict
endeavour to form terse English lines of apt words well compacted. Many
passages appear to have been half thought out in Greek or Latin, some, as
that on the sea-shell (on page 19), were first written in Latin, and
Landor re-issued “Gebir” with a translation into Latin three or four
years after its first appearance.
“Gebir” was written nine years after the outbreak of the French
Revolution, and at a time when the victories of Napoleon were in many
minds associated with the hopes of man. In the first edition of the poem
there were, in the nuptial voyage of Tamar, prophetic visions of the
triumph of his race, in march of the French Republic from the Garonne to
the Rhine—
“How grand a prospect opens! Alps o’er Alps
Tower, to survey the triumphs that proceed.
Here, while Garumna dances in the gloom
Of larches, mid her naiads, or reclined
Leans on a broom-clad bank to watch the sports
Of some far-distant chamois silken haired,
The chaste Pyrené, drying up her tears,
Finds, with your children, refuge: yonder, Rhine
Lays his imperial sceptre at your feet.”
The hope of the purer spirits in the years of revolution, expressed by
Wordsworth’s
“War shall cease,
Did ye not hear, that conquest is abjured?”
was in the first design of “Gebir,” and in those early years of hope
Landor joined to the vision of the future for the sons of Tamar that,
“Captivity led captive, war o’erthrown,
They shall o’er Europe, shall o’er earth extend
Empire that seas alone and skies confine,
And glory that shall strike the crystal stars.”
Landor was led by the failure of immediate expectation to revise his poem
and omit from the third and the sixth books about one hundred and fifty
lines, while adding fifty to heal over the wounds made by excision. As
the poem stands, it is a rebuke of tyrannous ambition in the tale of
Gebir, prince of Boetic Spain, from whom Gibraltar took its name. Gebir,
bound by a vow to his dying father in the name of ancestral feud to
invade Egypt, prepares invasion, but yields in Egypt to the touch of
love, seeks to rebuild the ruins of the past, and learns what are the
fruits of ambition. This he learns in the purgatory of conquerors, where
he sees the figures of the Stuarts, of William the Deliverer, and of
George the Third, “with eyebrows white and slanting brow,” intentionally
confused with Louis XVI. to avoid a charge of treason. But the strength
of Landor’s sympathy with the French Revolution and of his contempt for
George III. was more evident in the first form of the poem. Parallel
with the quenching in Gebir of the conqueror’s ambition, and with the
ruin of his life and its new hope by the destroying powers that our
misunderstandings of the better life bring into play, runs that part of
the poem which shows Tamar, his brother, preparing to dwell with the sea
nymph, the ideal, far away from all the struggle of mankind.
Recognition of the great beauty of Lander’s “Gebir” came first from
Southey in “The Critical Review.” Southey found that the poem grew upon
him, and became afterwards Landor’s lifelong friend. When Shelley was at
Oxford in 1811, there were times when he would read nothing but “Gebir.”
His friend Hogg says that when he went to Shelley’s rooms one morning to
tell him something of importance, he could not draw his attention away
from “Gebir.” Hogg impatiently threw the book out of window. It was
brought back by a servant, and Shelley immediately fastened upon it
again.
At the close of 1805 Landor’s father died, and the young poet became a
man of property. In 1808 Southey and Landor first met. Their friendship
remained unbroken. When Spain rose to throw off the yoke of Napoleon,
Landor’s enthusiasm carried him to Corunna, where he paid for the
equipment of a thousand volunteers, and joined the Spanish army of the
North. After the Convention of Cintra he returned to England. Then he
bought a large Welsh estate—Llanthony Priory—paid for it by selling other
property, and began costly improvements. But he lived chiefly at Bath,
where he married, in 1811, when his age was thirty-six, a girl of twenty.
It was then that he began his tragedy of “Count Julian.” The patriotic
struggle in Spain commended at the same time to Scott, Southey, and
Landor the story of Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings, against whom,
to avenge wrong done to his daughter, Count Julian called the Moors in to
invade his country. In 1810 Southey was working at his poem of “Roderick
the Last of the Goths,” in fellowship with his friend Landor, who was
treating the same subject in his play. Scott’s “Roderick” was being
printed so nearly at the same time with Landor’s play, that Landor wrote
to Southey early in 1812 while the proof-sheets were coming to him: “I am
surprised that Upham has not sent me Mr. Scott’s poem yet. However, I am
not sorry. I feel a sort of satisfaction that mine is going to the press
first, though there is little danger that we should think on any subject
alike, or stumble on any one character in the same track.” De Quincey
spoke of the hidden torture shown in Landor’s play to be ever present in
the mind of Count Julian, the betrayer of his country, as greater than
the tortures inflicted in old Rome on generals who had committed treason.
De Quincey’s admiration of this play was more than once expressed. “Mr.
Landor,” he said, “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 bear 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; never was so majestically described.”