"In all law-courts that I have ever entered
The least effrontery, the least dishonesty,
Has lain among the prosecuted thieves."--P. 557.
I shall have occasion to quote a few more verses when speaking of Mr.
Landor's life. His Imaginary Conversations is the work on which his
fame, a worthy and well earned fame, will rest. From his great
experience of men of various nations, and his familiar acquaintance
with both ancient and modern literature, he has been enabled to
introduce the greatest variety of characters and topics, and to make
the dialogues a perfect treasury of the broadest and most elevated
axioms of practical wisdom. As I have observed, his station and
personal interests have not been able to blind him to the claims
of universal justice. He attacks all follies and all selfish
conventionalisms with an unsparing scorn, which, in a poor man, would
have been attributed to envy; but in his case, can not be otherwise
regarded than as the honest convictions of a clear-seeing and just
mind. In all his writings he insensibly slides into the dramatic form;
even in his Pentameron, not less than in his Citation and Examination
of William Shakspeare. His Pericles and Aspasia is in the form of
letters, a form but one remove from conversation; in fact,
conversation on paper. He must raise up the prominent characters of
all ages, and, bringing the most antagonistic together, set them to
argue some great or curious topic suited to their minds and pursuits.
Through all these the author's own sentiments diffuse themselves, and
become the soul of the book. Whoever converse, we are made to feel
that virtue, generosity, self-sacrifice, and a warm sense of the wants
and the true claims of the multitude, animate the soul of the author,
and maintain a perpetual warfare against their opposite qualities, and
the world's acquiescence in them. Mr. Landor, no doubt, like his
fellows, does not despise the advantages which fortune has conferred
on him; but he prides himself far more obviously on the power which
resides in his pen. In his conversation with the Marchese Pallavicini,
that nobleman relates the atrocious conduct of an English general at
Albaro, and says, "Your Houses of Parliament, Mr. Landor, for their
own honor, for the honor of the service, and the nation, should have
animadverted on such an outrage; he should answer for it." To which
Landor replies:--"These two fingers have more power, marchese, than
those two houses. A pen! he shall live for it. What, with their
animadversions, can they do like this?"
In his conversation between Southey and Porson, he puts into the mouth
of Southey a sentence which all people would do well to ground firmly
into their minds, and remember when they are reading reviews:--"We
have about a million of critics in Great Britain; not a soul of which
critics entertains the least doubt of his own infallibility. You, with
all your learning, and all your canons of criticisms, will never make
them waver." Into Porson's mouth he puts also a great fact, which, had
he been a poor man, would have been hurled back on his head, and have
crushed him to death. "Racy wine comes from the high vineyard. There
is a spice of the scoundrel in most of our literary men; an itch to
filch and detract in the midst of fair-speaking and festivity. This is
the reason why I have never much associated with them. There is also
another. We have nothing in common but the alphabet. The most popular
of our critics have no heart for poetry: it is morbidly sensitive on
one side, and utterly callous on the other. They dandle some little
poet, and never will let you take him off their knees; him they feed
to bursting, with their curds and whey. Another they warn off the
premises, and will give him neither a crust nor a crumb, until they
hear that he has succeeded to a large estate in popularity, with
plenty of dependents; then they sue and supplicate to be admitted
among the number; and, lastly, when they hear of his death, they put
on mourning, and advertise to raise a monument or a club-room to his
memory."
In the same conversation he has a striking illustration of the nature
of metaphysics. "What a blessing are metaphysics to our generation! A
poet or any other who can make nothing clear, can stir up enough
sediment to render the bottom of a basin as invisible as the deepest
gulf of the Atlantic. The shallowest pond, if turbid, has depth enough
for a goose to hide its head in." He has a remark, not the less happy,
on the folly of our reading ill-natured critiques on ourselves, and on
the light in which those who inform you of them ought to be regarded.
"The whole world might write against me, and leave me ignorant of it
to the day of my death. A friend who announces to me such things, has
performed the last act of his friendship. It is no more pardonable
than to lift up the gnat net over my bed, on pretext of showing me
there are gnats in the room. If I owed a man a grudge, I would get him
to write against me; but if any one owed me one, he would come and
tell me of it."
Here are two opinions worthy of the deepest reflection. "In our days,
only men who have some unsoundness of conscience and some latent fear,
reason against religion; and those only scoff at it, who are pushed
back and hurt by it."--Vol. i. p. 372. "More are made insurgents by
firing on them than by feeding them; and men are more dangerous in the
field than in the kitchen."--P. 379. Mr. Landor's opinion of gambling,
even ordinary, everyday play in private houses for money stakes, is
expressed with a virtuous force which proves the depth of the feeling
against it. "You played! Do you call it playing, to plunder your
guests and overreach your friends? Do you call it playing, to be
unhappy if you can not be a robber, happy if you can be one? The
fingers of a gamester reach farther than a robber's, or a murderer's,
and do more mischief. Against the robber or murderer, the country's up
in arms at once; to the gamester every bosom is open, that he may
contaminate or stab it."-Vol. ii. p. 76. Stern to faults which are
tolerated, nay, are cherished by society, Savage Landor would be
lenient where the wide-spreading misery and degradation of women in
the present day calls loudly for a change in our social philosophy.
"_Marvel._--Men who have been unsparing of their wisdom, like
ladies who have been unfrugal of their favors, are abandoned by those
who owe most to them, and hated or slighted by the rest. I wish beauty
in her lost estate had consolations like genius.
"_Parker._--Fie, fie! Mr. Marvel! consolations for frailty!
"_Marvel._--What wants them more? The reed is cut down, and
seldom does the sickle wound the hand that cuts it. There it lies;
trampled on, withered, and soon to be blown away."
Perhaps there is no one conversation in which so many popular
fallacies and customs are so ruthlessly dealt with, as in that between
the Emperor of China and his servant Tsing-Zi, who has been in
England. His description of the Quakers is most characteristic.
Tsing-Zi is astonished at the anti-Christian pugnacity of those
calling themselves Christians. They make wars to make their children's
fortune, and the preachers of the peaceful gospel are ready, if they
disagree in a doctrine, to fight like a pair of cockerels across a
staff on a market-man's shoulder. One scanty sect is different. "These
never work in the fields or manufactories; but buy up corn when it is
cheap, sell it again when it is dear, and are more thankful to God for
a famine than others are for plenteousness. Painting and sculpture
they condemn; they never dance, they never sing; music is as hateful
to them as discord. They always look cool in hot weather, and warm in
cold. Few of them are ugly, fewer handsome, none graceful. I do not
remember to have seen a person of dark complexion, or hair quite
black, or very curly, in their confraternity. None of them are
singularly pale, none red, none of diminutive stature, none remarkably
tall. They have no priests among them, and constantly refuse to make
oblations to the priests royal."--Vol. ii. p. 119.
But there is, in fact, scarcely any great question of religion,
morals, government, or the social condition, on which in these
conversations the boldest opinions are not expressed in the most
unshrinking style. Landor strips away all the finery in which follies,
vices, and imposture are disguised for selfish ends, with a strong and
unceremonious hand. He lifts up the veil of worldly policy, and
showing us the hideous objects behind, says, "Behold your gods, O
Israel!" His doctrines are such as would, less than ages ago, have
consigned him to a pitiless persecution; they are such as, perhaps, in
less than half another century, through the means of popular
education, will be the common property of the common mind. The works
of Savage Landor, both prose and poetry, place him among the very
first men of his age. They are masterly, discriminating, and full of a
genuine, English robustness. "They are energy and imagination that
make the great poet," he has said in conversation. If he does not
equal some of our poets in intensity of imagination, there are few of
them who can compete with him in energy; and what is peculiarly
fortunate, the instinct by which he cleaves to the real, and spurns
the meretricious with contempt, makes him eminently safe for a
teacher. You can find no glittering, plausible, destructive
monstrosity, whether in the shape of man or notion, which Landor, like
too many of our writers, has taken the perverse fancy to deify. His
opinion of Bonaparte is a striking example of this. Hazlitt, acute and
discriminating as he often was, placed this selfish and brutal butcher
on a pedestal for adoration. Landor, in his conversation between
"Landor, English visitor, and Florentine visitor," has given us an
analysis of his character. He commences this with this remark.
"Bonaparte seems to me the most extraordinary of mortals, because I am
persuaded that so much power never was acquired by another, with so
small an exertion of genius, and so little of any thing that
captivates the affections; or maintained so long unbroken in a
succession of enormous faults, such scandalous disgraces, such
disastrous failures and defeats." He shows that he lost seven great
armies in succession, which in every case of defeat he abandoned to
destruction. If he has not said it in his works he has in
conversation, that the true mark of a great man is, that he has
accomplished great achievements with small means. Bonaparte never did
this. He overwhelmed all obstacles by enormous masses of soldiery. He
was as notorious for his recklessness of human life, for no possible
end but his own notoriety, for his private cruelties and murders, as
for his insolence and undignified anger; scolding those who offended
him like a fishwoman, boxing their ears, kicking them, etc. Landor's
words have always been my own--"It has always been wonderful to me,
what sympathy any well educated Englishman can have with an
ungenerous, ungentlemanly, unmanly Corsican."
Such is Walter Savage Landor as a writer, let us now look at him as a
man. Landor's physical development is correspondent to that of his
mind. He is a tall, large man; broadly and muscularly built, yet with
an air of great activity about him. His ample chest, the erect bearing
of his head, the fire and quick motion of his eye, all impress you
with the feeling of a powerful, ardent, and decided man. The general
character of his head is fine; massy, phrenologically amply developed,
and set upon the bust with a bearing full of strength and character.
His features are well formed and full of the same character. In his
youth, Landor must have been pronounced handsome; in his present age,
with gray hair and considerable baldness, he presents a fine, manly,
and impressive presence. There is instantaneous evidence of the utter
absence of disguise about him. You have no occasion to look deep, and
ponder cautiously to discover his character. It is there written
broadly on his front. All is open, frank, and self-determined. The
lower part of his face displays much thought and firmness; there is a
quick and hawk-like expression about the upper, which the somewhat
retreating yet broad forehead increases. His eyebrows, arched
singularly high on his forehead, diminish the apparent height of the
head; but on looking at his profile, you soon perceive the great
elevation of the skull above the line running from the ear to the eye.
The structure, the air of the whole man, his action, voice, and mode
of talking, all denote an extraordinary personage. His character is
most unequivocally passionate, impulsive, yet intellectual and
reflective; capable of excitement and of becoming impetuous, and
perhaps headlong, for the fire and strength in him are of no common
intensity. One can see that the quick instincts of his nature, that
electric principle by which such natures leap to their conclusions,
would render him excessively impatient of the slower processes or more
sordid biases of more common minds. That he must be liable to great
outbursts of indignation, and capable of becoming arbitrary and
overbearing; yet you soon find, on conversing with him, that no man is
so ready to be convinced of the right, or so free to rectify the
errors of a hasty judgment. He has, in short, an essentially fine,
high, vigorous nature; one which speaks forth in every page of his
writings, and yet is so different to the stereotype of the world as to
incur its dictum of eccentric.
Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick, on the 30th of January,
1775, consequently he is in his seventy-first year. The house in which
he was born is near the chapel, and has a fine old spacious garden,
well kept up by its present inhabitant, his only surviving sister. It
is the best house in the town, and had a beautiful front before the
improvement of the street required that four or five feet of the
basement should be erased. Savage Landor's mother used to spend nearly
half the year there, as his sister does now; for the garden has great
charms, swarming with blackbirds, thrushes, and even wood-pigeons,
which haunt several lofty elms and horse-chestnuts. His family had
considerable estates both in Staffordshire and Warwickshire many
centuries ago. His mother was eldest daughter and coheiress of Charles
Savage, Esq., of Tachbrook, whose family were lords of that manor and
of the neighboring manor of Whitmarsh, in the reign of Henry II. and
much earlier. One of this family, according to Rapin, played a
conspicuous part in demanding a charter from the weak king, Edward
II., and in bringing his minion, Piers Gaveston, to his end. This was
Sir Arnold Savage, whom Landor has commemorated by a conversation
between him and Henry IV., and by a note at the end of it, viz.--"Sir
Arnold Savage, according to Elsyne, was the first Speaker of the House
of Commons who appeared _upon any record_, to have been appointed
to the dignity as now constituted. He was elected a second time, four
years afterward, a rare honor in earlier days; and during this
presidency he headed the Commons, and delivered their resolutions in
the plain words recorded by Hakewell." One of these was that the king
should receive no subsidy till he had removed every cause of public
grievance. Landor has come of good patriot blood. The Savages have
also figured in Ireland; and Landor has introduced one of them, Philip
Savage, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in Swift's time, in his
Conversation with Archbishop Boulter, also connected by marriage with
the Savage family. "Boulter," says Landor, "Primate of Ireland, and
president of the council, saved that kingdom from pestilence and
famine in the year 1279, by supplying the poor with bread, medicines,
attendance, and every possible comfort and accommodation. Again, in
1740 and 1741, two hundred and fifty thousand were fed twice a-day,
principally at his expense, as we find in _La Biographie Universelle_;
an authority the least liable to suspicion. He built hospitals at
Drogheda and Armagh, and endowed them richly. No private man, in any
age or country, has contributed so largely to relieve the sufferings
of his fellow-creatures; to which object he and his wife devoted their
ample fortunes, both during their lives and after their decease.
Boulter was certainly the most disinterested, the most humane, the
most beneficent man that ever guided the councils of Ireland." Philip
Savage, the chancellor, was so irreproachable, that even Swift, the
reviler of Somers, could find in him no motive for satire and no room
for discontent. Such was the ancestry of Walter Savage Landor.
Mr. Landor spent the first days of his youth at Ipsley-court, near
Redditch, in Warwickshire, which manor belongs to him. You may trace
his life and his residence by glimpses in his works; and of his old
family mansion he speaks in his Conversation with the Marchese
Pallavicini.
"_Pallavicini._--We Genoese are proud of our door-ways.
"_Landor._--They are magnificent; so are many in Rome, and some
in Milan. We have none in London, and few in the country; where,
however, the stair-cases are better. They are usually oak. I inherit
an old, ruinous house, containing one, up which the tenant rode his
horse to stable him."