which is the elegy of his loss and the prediction of his recovery.
In the gay saloon he laments that these figures are not what
Raphael and Guercino painted. Withered though he stand, and trifler
though he be, the august spirit of the world looks out from his
eyes. In his heart he knows the ache of spiritual pain, and his
thought can animate the sea and land. What then shall hinder the
Genius of the time from speaking its thought? It cannot be silent,
if it would. It will write in a higher spirit and a wider knowledge
and with a grander practical aim than ever yet guided the pen of
poet. It will write the annals of a changed world, and record the
descent of principles into practice, of love into Government, of
love into Trade. It will describe the new heroic life of man, the
now unbelieved possibility of simple living and of clean and noble
relations with men. Religion will bind again these that were sometime
frivolous, customary, enemies, skeptics, self-seekers, into a joyful
reverence for the circumambient Whole, and that which was ecstacy
shall become daily bread.
II.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.[6]
We sometimes meet in a stage coach in New England an erect, muscular
man, with fresh complexion and a smooth hat, whose nervous speech
instantly betrays the English traveller;—a man nowise cautious to
conceal his name or that of his native country, or his very slight
esteem for the persons and the country that surround him. When Mr.
Bull rides in an American coach, he speaks quick and strong; he
is very ready to confess his ignorance of everything about him,
persons, manners, customs, politics, geography. He wonders that the
Americans should build with wood, whilst all this stone is lying in
the roadside; and is astonished to learn that a wooden house may last
a hundred years; nor will he remember the fact as many minutes after
it has been told him: he wonders that they do not make elder-wine and
cherry-bounce, since here are cherries, and every mile is crammed
with elder-bushes. He has never seen a good horse in America, nor a
good coach, nor a good inn. Here is very good earth and water and
plenty of them; that he is free to allow; to all other gifts of
nature or man his eyes are sealed by the inexorable demand for the
precise conveniences to which he is accustomed in England. Add to
this proud blindness the better quality of great downrightness in
speaking the truth, and the love of fair play, on all occasions, and
moreover the peculiarity which is alleged of the Englishman, that his
virtues do not come out until he quarrels.
Transfer these traits to a very elegant and accomplished mind, and
we shall have no bad picture of Walter Savage Landor, who may stand
as a favorable impersonation of the genius of his countrymen at the
present day. A sharp, dogmatic man, with a great deal of knowledge,
a great deal of worth, and a great deal of pride; with a profound
contempt for all that he does not understand; a master of all elegant
learning, and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and
yet prone to indulge a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and
language. His partialities and dislikes are by no means culpable, but
are often whimsical and amusing; yet they are quite sincere, and,
like those of Johnson and Coleridge, are easily separable from the
man. What he says of Wordsworth is true of himself, that he delights
to throw a clod of dirt on the table, and cry “Gentlemen, there is
a better man than all of you.” Bolivar, Mina and General Jackson
will never be greater soldiers than Napoleon and Alexander, let Mr.
Landor think as he will; nor will he persuade us to burn Plato and
Xenophon, out of our admiration of Bishop Patrick, or “Lucas on
Happiness,” or “Lucas on Holiness,” or even Barrow’s Sermons. Yet a
man may love a paradox without either losing his wit or his honesty.
A less pardonable eccentricity is the cold and gratuitous obtrusion
of licentious images, not so much the suggestion of merriment as of
bitterness. Montaigne assigns as a reason for his license of speech,
that he is tired of seeing his Essays on the work-tables of ladies,
and he is determined they shall for the future put them out of sight.
In Mr. Landor’s coarseness there is a certain air of defiance, and
the rude word seems sometimes to arise from a disgust at niceness
and over-refinement. Before a well-dressed company he plunges his
fingers in a cesspool, as if to expose the whiteness of his hands
and the jewels of his ring. Afterward, he washes them in water, he
washes them in wine; but you are never secure from his freaks. A sort
of Earl Peterborough in literature, his eccentricity is too decided
not to have diminished his greatness. He has capital enough to have
furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written no book.
But we have spoken all our discontent. Possibly his writings are
open to harsher censure; but we love the man, from sympathy as well
as for reasons to be assigned; and have no wish, if we were able, to
put an argument in the mouth of his critics. Now for twenty years
we have still found the “Imaginary Conversations” a sure resource
in solitude, and it seems to us as original in its form as in its
matter. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page, wherein we are
always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise
understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen
books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an
experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for every
just and generous sentiment and a scourge like that of Furies for
every oppressor, whether public or private,—we feel how dignified is
this perpetual Censor in his curule chair, and we wish to thank a
benefactor of the reading world.
Mr. Landor is one of the foremost of that small class who make
good in the nineteenth century the claims of pure literature. In
these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little
disposition to profound thought or to any but the most superficial
intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar, receiving from
past ages the treasures of wit and enlarging them by his own love,
is a friend and consoler of mankind. When we pronounce the names of
Homer and Æschylus; Horace, Ovid and Plutarch; Erasmus, Scaliger
and Montaigne; Ben Jonson and Isaak Walton; Dryden and Pope,—we
pass at once out of trivial associations and enter into a region of
the purest pleasure accessible to human nature. We have quitted all
beneath the moon and entered that crystal sphere in which everything
in the world of matter reappears, but transfigured and immortal.
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs
of his condition. The existence of the poorest play-wright and the
humblest scrivener is a good omen. A charm attaches to the most
inferior names which have in any manner got themselves enrolled in
the registers of the House of Fame, even as porters and grooms in the
courts; to Creech and Fenton, Theobald and Dennis, Aubrey and Spence.
From the moment of entering a library and opening a desired book, we
cease to be citizens, creditors, debtors, housekeepers and men of
care and fear. What boundless leisure! what original jurisdiction!
the old constellations have set, new and brighter have arisen; an
Elysian light tinges all objects:—
“In the afternoon we came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.”
And this sweet asylum of an intellectual life must appear to have
the sanction of nature, as long as so many men are born with so
decided an aptitude for reading and writing. Let us thankfully allow
every faculty and art which opens new scope to a life so confined
as ours. There are vast spaces in a thought: a slave, to whom the
religious sentiment is opened, has a freedom which makes his master’s
freedom a slavery. Let us not be so illiberal with our schemes for
the renovation of society and nature as to disesteem or deny the
literary spirit. Certainly there are heights in nature which command
this; there are many more which this commands. It is vain to call it
a luxury, and as saints and reformers are apt to do, decry it as a
species of day-dreaming. What else are sanctities, and reforms, and
all other things? Whatever can make for itself an element, means,
organs, servants, and the most profound and permanent existence
in the hearts and heads of millions of men, must have a reason
for its being. Its excellency is reason and vindication enough. If
rhyme rejoices us there should be rhyme, as much as if fire cheers
us we should bring wood and coals. Each kind of excellence takes
place for its hour and excludes everything else. Do not brag of your
actions, as if they were better than Homer’s verses or Raphael’s
pictures. Raphael and Homer feel that action is pitiful beside
their enchantments. They could act too, if the stake was worthy of
them: but now all that is good in the universe urges them to their
task. Whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty, and not with
ulterior ends, belongs to this sacred class; and among these, few
men of the present age have a better claim to be numbered than Mr.
Landor. Wherever genius or taste has existed, wherever freedom and
justice are threatened, which he values as the element in which
genius may work, his interest is sure to be commanded. His love
of beauty is passionate, and betrays itself in all petulant and
contemptuous expressions.
But beyond his delight in genius and his love of individual and civil
liberty, Mr. Landor has a perception that is much more rare, the
appreciation of character. This is the more remarkable considered
with his intense nationality, to which we have already alluded. He is
buttoned in English broadcloth to the chin. He hates the Austrians,
the Italians, the French, the Scotch, and the Irish. He has the
common prejudices of an English landholder; values his pedigree, his
acres and the syllables of his name; loves all his advantages, is not
insensible to the beauty of his watch seal, or the Turk’s head on
his umbrella; yet with all this miscellaneous pride there is a noble
nature within him which instructs him that he is so rich that he can
well spare all his trappings, and, leaving to others the painting
of circumstance, aspire to the office of delineating character. He
draws his own portrait in the costume of a village schoolmaster, and
a sailor, and serenely enjoys the victory of nature over fortune. Not
only the elaborated story of Normanby, but the whimsical selection
of his heads proves this taste. He draws with evident pleasure
the portrait of a man who never said anything right and never did
anything wrong. But in the character of Pericles he has found full
play for beauty and greatness of behavior, where the circumstances
are in harmony with the man. These portraits, though mere sketches,
must be valued as attempts in the very highest kind of narrative,
which not only has very few examples to exhibit of any success,
but very few competitors in the attempt. The word Character is in
all mouths; it is a force which we all feel; yet who has analyzed
it? What is the nature of that subtle and majestic principle which
attaches us to a few persons, not so much by personal as by the most
spiritual ties? What is the quality of the persons who, without being
public men, or literary men, or rich men, or active men, or (in the
popular sense) religious men, have a certain salutary omnipresence
in all our life’s history, almost giving their own quality to the
atmosphere and the landscape? A moral force, yet wholly unmindful of
creed and catechism, intellectual, but scornful of books, it works
directly and without means, and though it may be resisted at any
time, yet resistance to it is a suicide. For the person who stands
in this lofty relation to his fellow-men is always the impersonation
to them of their conscience. It is a sufficient proof of the
extreme delicacy of this element, evanescing before any but the most
sympathetic vision, that it has so seldom been employed in the drama
and in novels. Mr. Landor, almost alone among living English writers,
has indicated his perception of it.
These merits make Mr. Landor’s position in the republic of letters
one of great mark and dignity. He exercises with a grandeur of
spirit the office of writer, and carries it with an air of old and
unquestionable nobility. We do not recollect an example of more
complete independence in literary history. He has no clanship, no
friendships that warp him. He was one of the first to pronounce
Wordsworth the great poet of the age, yet he discriminates his faults
with the greater freedom. He loves Pindar, Æschylus, Euripides,
Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Virgil, yet with open eyes. His position
is by no means the highest in literature: he is not a poet or a
philosopher. He is a man full of thoughts, but not, like Coleridge, a
man of ideas. Only from a mind conversant with the First Philosophy
can definitions be expected. Coleridge has contributed many valuable
ones to modern literature. Mr. Landor’s definitions are only
enumerations of particulars; the generic law is not seized. But as it
is not from the highest Alps or Andes but from less elevated summits
that the most attractive landscape is commanded, so is Mr. Landor
the most useful and agreeable of critics. He has commented on a wide
variety of writers, with a closeness and extent of view which has
enhanced the value of those authors to his readers. His Dialogue on
the Epicurean philosophy is a theory of the genius of Epicurus. The
Dialogue between Barrow and Newton is the best of all criticisms on
the essays of Bacon. His picture of Demosthenes in three several
Dialogues is new and adequate. He has illustrated the genius of
Homer, Æschylus, Pindar, Euripides, Thucydides. Then he has examined
before he has expatiated, and the minuteness of his verbal criticism
gives a confidence in his fidelity when he speaks the language of
meditation or of passion. His acquaintance with the English tongue is
unsurpassed. He “hates false words, and seeks with care, difficulty
and moroseness those that fit the thing.” He knows the value of his
own words. “They are not,” he says, “written on slate.” He never
stoops to explanation, nor uses seven words where one will do. He
is a master of condensation and suppression, and that in no vulgar
way. He knows the wide difference between compression and an obscure
elliptical style. The dense writer has yet ample room and choice of
phrase, and even a gamesome mood often between his valid words. There
is no inadequacy or disagreeable contraction in his sentence, any
more than in a human face, where in a square space of a few inches is
found room for every possible variety of expression.
Yet it is not as an artist that Mr. Landor commends himself to us.
He is not epic or dramatic, he has not the high, overpowering method
by which the master gives unity and integrity to a work of many
parts. He is too wilful, and never abandons himself to his genius.
His books are a strange mixture of politics, etymology, allegory,
sentiment, and personal history; and what skill of transition he
may possess is superficial, not spiritual. His merit must rest, at
last, not on the spirit of the dialogue or the symmetry of any of
his historical portraits, but on the value of his sentences. Many of
these will secure their own immortality in English literature; and
this, rightly considered, is no mean merit. These are not plants and
animals, but the genetical atoms of which both are composed. All our
great debt to the Oriental world is of this kind, not utensils and
statues of the precious metal, but bullion and gold-dust. Of many of
Mr. Landor’s sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those
of Socrates; that they are cubes, which will stand firm, place them
how or where you will.
III.
PRAYERS.[7]
“Not with fond shekels of the tested gold,
Nor gems whose rates are either rich or poor
As fancy values them: but with true prayers,
That shall be up at heaven and enter there
Ere sunrise; prayers from preserved souls,
From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate
To nothing temporal.” SHAKSPEARE.
Pythagoras said that the time when men are honestest is when they
present themselves before the gods. If we can overhear the prayer we
shall know the man. But prayers are not made to be overheard, or to
be printed, so that we seldom have the prayer otherwise than it can
be inferred from the man and his fortunes, which are the answer to
the prayer, and always accord with it. Yet there are scattered about
in the earth a few records of these devout hours, which it would
edify us to read, could they be collected in a more catholic spirit
than the wretched and repulsive volumes which usurp that name. Let
us not have the prayers of one sect, nor of the Christian Church, but
of men in all ages and religions who have prayed well. The prayer of
Jesus is (as it deserves) become a form for the human race. Many men
have contributed a single expression, a single word to the language
of devotion, which is immediately caught and stereotyped in the
prayers of their church and nation. Among the remains of Euripides we
have this prayer: “Thou God of all! infuse light into the souls of
men, whereby they may be enabled to know what is the root from whence
all their evils spring, and by what means they may avoid them.” In
the Phædrus of Plato, we find this petition in the mouth of Socrates:
“O gracious Pan! and ye other gods who preside over this place!
grant that I may be beautiful within; and that those external things
which I have may be such as may best agree with a right internal
disposition of mine; and that I may account him to be rich, who is
wise and just.” Wacic the Caliph, who died A. D. 845, ended his life,
the Arabian historians tell us, with these words: “O thou whose
kingdom never passes away, pity one whose dignity is so transient.”
But what led us to these remembrances was the happy accident which
in this undevout age lately brought us acquainted with two or three
diaries, which attest, if there be need of attestation, the eternity
of the sentiment and its equality to itself through all the variety
of expression. The first is the prayer of a deaf and dumb boy:—
“When my long-attached friend comes to me, I have pleasure
to converse with him, and I rejoice to pass my eyes over his
countenance; but soon I am weary of spending my time causelessly
and unimproved, and I desire to leave him, (but not in rudeness),
because I wished to be engaged in my business. But thou, O my
Father, knowest I always delight to commune with thee in my lone
and silent heart; I am never full of thee; I am never weary of
thee; I am always desiring thee. I hunger with strong hope and
affection for thee, and I thirst for thy grace and spirit.
“When I go to visit my friends, I must put on my best garments, and
I must think of my manner to please them. I am tired to stay long,
because my mind is not free, and they sometimes talk gossip with
me. But oh, my Father, thou visitest me in my work, and I can lift
up my desires to thee, and my heart is cheered and at rest with thy
presence, and I am always alone with thee, and thou dost not steal
my time by foolishness. I always ask in my heart, where can I find
thee?”
The next is a voice out of a solitude as strict and sacred as that in
which nature had isolated this eloquent mute:—
“My Father, when I cannot be cheerful or happy, I can be true
and obedient, and I will not forget that joy has been, and may
still be. If there is no hour of solitude granted me, still I
will commune with thee. If I may not search out and pierce thy
thought, so much the more may my living praise thee. At whatever
price, I must be alone with thee; this must be the demand I make.
These duties are not the life, but the means which enable us to
show forth the life. So must I take up this cross, and bear it
willingly. Why should I feel reproved when a busy one enters the
room? I am not idle, though I sit with folded hands, but instantly
I must seek some cover. For that shame I reprove myself. Are they
only the valuable members of society who labor to dress and feed
it? Shall we never ask the aim of all this hurry and foam, of this
aimless activity? Let the purpose for which I live be always before
me; let every thought and word go to confirm and illuminate that
end; namely, that I must become near and dear to thee; that now I
am beyond the reach of all but thee.
“How can we not be reconciled to thy will? I will know the joy
of giving to my friend the dearest treasure I have. I know that
sorrow comes not at once only. We cannot meet it and say, now it is
overcome, but again, and yet again, its flood pours over us, and as
full as at first.
“If but this tedious battle could be fought,
Like Sparta’s heroes at one rocky pass,
‘One day be spent in dying,’ men had sought
The spot, and been cut down like mower’s grass.”
The next is in a metrical form. It is the aspiration of a different
mind, in quite other regions of power and duty, yet they all accord
at last.
“Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high,
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
“And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.
“That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
And my life practise more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show,
Nor my relenting lines,
That I thy purpose did not know,
Or overrated thy designs.”
The last of the four orisons is written in a singularly calm and
healthful spirit, and contains this petition:—
“My Father: I now come to thee with a desire to thank thee for the
continuance of our love, the one for the other. I feel that without
thy love in me I should be alone here in the flesh. I cannot
express my gratitude for what thou hast been and continuest to be
to me. But thou knowest what my feelings are. When nought on earth
seemeth pleasant to me, thou dost make thyself known to me, and
teach that which is needful for me, and dost cheer my travels on.
I know that thou hast not created me and placed me here on earth,
amidst its toils and troubles and the follies of those around me,
and told me to be like thyself when I see so little of thee here
to profit by; thou hast not done this, and then left me here to
myself, a poor, weak man, scarcely able to earn my bread. No; thou
art my Father and I will love thee, for thou didst first love me,
and lovest me still. We will ever be parent and child. Wilt thou
give me strength to persevere in this great work of redemption.
Wilt thou show me the true means of accomplishing it.... I thank
thee for the knowledge that I have attained of thee by thy sons
who have been before me, and especially for him who brought me so
perfect a type of thy goodness and love to men.... I know that thou
wilt deal with me as I deserve. I place myself therefore in thy
hand, knowing that thou wilt keep me from harm so long as I consent
to live under thy protecting care.”
Let these few scattered leaves, which a chance (as men say, but which
to us shall be holy) brought under our eye nearly at the same moment,
stand as an example of innumerable similar expressions which no
mortal witness has reported, and be a sign of the times. Might they
be suggestion to many a heart of yet higher secret experiences which
are ineffable! But we must not tie up the rosary on which we have
strung these few white beads, without adding a pearl of great price
from that book of prayer, the “Confessions of Saint Augustine.”