was for a long time confined to a narrow sect, and he did all in his
power to hinder its spread by wilful disregard of the established
canons--even when founded in reason. A reformer who will not court the
prejudices even of his friends is likely to be slow in making converts.
But it is one thing to be slow in getting a hearing, and another in
attracting men who are quite prepared to hear. Wordsworth resembled a
man coming into a drawing-room with muddy boots and a smock-frock. He
courted disgust, and such courtship is pretty sure of success. But
Landor made his bow in full court-dress. In spite of the difficulty of
his poetry, he had all the natural graces which are apt to propitiate
cultivated readers. His prose has merits so conspicuous and so dear to
the critical mind, that one might have expected his welcome from the
connoisseurs to be warm even beyond the limit of sincerity. To praise
him was to announce one's own possession of a fine classical taste, and
there can be no greater stimulus to critical enthusiasm. One might have
guessed that he would be a favourite with all who set up for a
discernment superior to that of the vulgar; though the causes which must
obstruct a wide recognition of his merits are sufficiently obvious. It
may be interesting to consider the cause of his ill-success with some
fulness; and it is a comfort to the critic to reflect that in such a
case even obtuseness is in some sort a qualification; for it will enable
one to sympathise with the vulgar insensibility to the offered delicacy,
if only to substitute articulate rejection for simple stolid silence.
I do not wish, indeed, to put forward such a claim too unreservedly. I
will merely take courage to confess that Landor very frequently bores
me. So do a good many writers whom I thoroughly admire. If any courage
be wanted for such a confession, it is certainly not when writing upon
Landor that one should be reticent for want of example. Nobody ever
spoke his mind more freely about great reputations. He is, for example,
almost the only poet who ever admitted that he could not read Spenser
continuously. Even Milton in Landor's hands, in defiance of his known
opinions, is made to speak contemptuously of 'The Faery Queen.' 'There
is scarcely a poet of the same eminence,' says Porson, obviously
representing Landor in this case, 'whom I have found it so delightful to
read in, and so hard to read through.' What Landor here says of Spenser,
I should venture to say of Landor. There are few books of the kind into
which one may dip with so great a certainty of finding much to admire as
the 'Imaginary Conversations,' and few of any high reputation which are
so certain to become wearisome after a time. And yet, upon thinking of
the whole five volumes so emphatically extolled by their author, one
feels the necessity of some apology for this admission of inadequate
sympathy. There is a vigour of feeling, an originality of character, a
fineness of style which makes one understand, if not quite agree to, the
audacious self-commendation. Part of the effect is due simply to the
sheer quantity of good writing. Take any essay separately, and one must
admit that--to speak only of his contemporaries--there is a greater
charm in passages of equal length by Lamb, De Quincey, or even Hazlitt.
None of them gets upon such stilts, or seems so anxious to keep the
reader at arm's length. But, on the other hand, there is something
imposing in so continuous a flow of stately and generally faultless
English, with so many weighty aphorisms rising spontaneously, without
splashing or disturbance, to the surface of talk, and such an easy
felicity of theme unmarred by the flash and glitter of the modern
epigrammatic style. Lamb is both sweeter and more profound, to say
nothing of his incomparable humour; but then Lamb's flight is short and
uncertain. De Quincey's passages of splendid rhetoric are too often
succeeded by dead levels of verbosity and laboured puerilities which
make annoyance alternate with enthusiasm. Hazlitt is often spasmodic,
and his intrusive egotism is pettish and undignified. But so far at
least as his style is concerned, Landor's unruffled abundant stream of
continuous harmony excites one's admiration the more the longer one
reads. Hardly anyone who has written so much has kept so uniformly to a
high level, and so seldom descended to empty verbosity or to downright
slipshod. It is true that the substance does not always correspond to
the perfection of the form. There are frequent discontinuities of
thought where the style is smoothest. He reminds one at times of those
Alpine glaciers where an exquisitely rounded surface of snow conceals
yawning crevasses beneath; and if one stops for a moment to think, one
is apt to break through the crust with an abrupt and annoying jerk.
The excellence of Landor's style has, of course, been universally
acknowledged, and it is natural that it should be more appreciated by
his fellow-craftsmen than by general readers less interested in
technical questions. The defects are the natural complements of its
merits. When accused of being too figurative, he had a ready reply.
'Wordsworth,' he says in one of his 'Conversations,' 'slithers on the
soft mud, and cannot stop himself until he comes down. In his poetry
there is as much of prose as there is of poetry in the prose of Milton.
But prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the
other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose,
and neither fan nor burnt feather can bring her to herself again.' The
remark about the relations of prose and poetry was originally made in a
real conversation with Wordsworth in defence of Landor's own luxuriance.
Wordsworth, it is said, took it to himself, and not without reason, as
appears by its insertion in this 'Conversation.' The retort, however
happy, is no more conclusive than other cases of the _tu quoque_. We are
too often inclined to say to Landor as Southey says to Porson in another
place: 'Pray leave these tropes and metaphors.' His sense suffers from a
superfetation of figures, or from the undue pursuit of a figure, till
the 'wind of the poor phrase is cracked.' In the phrase just quoted, for
example, we could dispense with the 'fan and burnt feather,' which have
very little relation to the thought. So, to take an instance of the
excessively florid, I may quote the phrase in which Marvell defends his
want of respect for the aristocracy of his day. 'Ever too hard upon
great men, Mr. Marvell!' says Bishop Parker; and Marvell replies:--
Little men in lofty places, who throw long shadows because
our sun is setting; the men so little and the places so
lofty that, casting my pebble, I only show where they stand.
They would be less contented with themselves, if they had
obtained their preferment honestly. Luck and dexterity
always give more pleasure than intellect and knowledge;
because they fill up what they fall on to the brim at once;
and people run to them with acclamations at the splash.
Wisdom is reserved and noiseless, contented with hard
earnings, and daily letting go some early acquisition to
make room for better specimens. But great is the exultation
of a worthless man when he receives for the chips and
raspings of his Bridewell logwood a richer reward than the
best and wisest for extensive tracts of well-cleared truths!
Even he who has sold his country--
'Forbear, good Mr. Marvell,' says Bishop Parker; and one is inclined to
sympathise with the poor man drowned under this cascade of tropes. It is
certainly imposing, but I should be glad to know the meaning of the
metaphor about 'luck and dexterity.' Passages occur, again, in which we
are tempted to think that Landor is falling into an imitation of an
obsolete model. Take, for example, the following:--
A narrow mind cannot be enlarged, nor can a capacious one be
contracted. Are we angry with a phial for not being a flask;
or do we wonder that the skin of an elephant sits uneasily
on a squirrel?
Or this, in reference to Wordsworth:--
Pastiness and flatness are the qualities of a pancake, and
thus far he attained his aim: but if he means it for me, let
him place the accessories on the table, lest what is insipid
and clammy ... grow into duller accretion and moister
viscidity the more I masticate it.
Or a remark given to Newton:--
Wherever there is vacuity of mind, there must either be
flaccidity or craving; and this vacuity must necessarily be
found in the greater part of princes, from the defects of
their education, from the fear of offending them in its
progress by interrogations and admonitions, from the habit
of rendering all things valueless by the facility with which
they are obtained, and transitory by the negligence with
which they are received and holden.
Should we not remove the names of Porson and Newton from these
sentences, and substitute Sam Johnson? The last passage reads very like
a quotation from the 'Rambler.' Johnson was, in my opinion and in
Landor's, a great writer in spite of his mannerism; but the mannerism is
always rather awkward, and in such places we seem to see--certainly not
a squirrel--but, say, a thoroughbred horse invested with the skin of an
elephant.
These lapses into the inflated are of course exceptional with Landor.
There can be no question of the fineness of his perception in all
matters of literary form. To say that his standard of style is classical
is to repeat a commonplace too obvious for repetition, except to add a
doubt whether he is not often too ostentatious and self-conscious in his
classicism. He loves and often exhibits a masculine simplicity, and
speaks with enthusiasm of Locke and Swift in their own departments.
Locke is to be 'revered;' he is 'too simply grand for admiration;' and
no one, he thinks, ever had such a power as Swift of saying forcibly and
completely whatever he meant to say. But for his own purposes he
generally prefers a different model. The qualities which he specially
claims seem to be summed up in the conversation upon Bacon's Essays
between Newton and Barrow. Cicero and Bacon, says Barrow, have more
wisdom between them than all the philosophers of antiquity. Newton's
review of the Essays, he adds, 'hath brought back to my recollection so
much of shrewd judgment, so much of rich imagery, such a profusion of
truths so plain as (without his manner of exhibiting them) to appear
almost unimportant, that in various high qualities of the human mind I
must acknowledge not only Cicero, but every prose writer among the
Greeks, to stand far below him. Cicero is least valued for his highest
merits, his fulness, and his perspicuity. Bad judges (and how few are
not so!) desire in composition the concise and obscure; not knowing that
the one most frequently arises from paucity of materials, and the other
from inability to manage and dispose them.' Landor aims, like Bacon, at
rich imagery, at giving to thoughts which appear plain more value by
fineness of expression, and at compressing shrewd judgments into weighty
aphorisms. He would equally rival Cicero in fulness and perspicuity;
whilst a severe rejection of everything slovenly or superfluous would
save him from ever deviating into the merely florid. So far as style can
be really separated from thought, we may admit unreservedly that he has
succeeded in his aim, and has attained a rare harmony of tone and
colouring.
There may, indeed, be some doubt as to his perspicuity. Southey said
that Landor was obscure, whilst adding that he could not explain the
cause of the obscurity. Causes enough may be suggested. Besides his
incoherency, his love of figures which sometimes become half detached
from the underlying thought, and an over-anxiety to avoid mere smartness
which sometimes leads to real vagueness, he expects too much from his
readers, or perhaps despises them too much. He will not condescend to
explanation if you do not catch his drift at half a word. He is so
desirous to round off his transitions gracefully, that he obliterates
the necessary indications of the main divisions of the subject. When
criticising Milton or Dante, he can hardly keep his hand off the finest
passages in his desire to pare away superfluities. Treating himself in
the same fashion, he leaves none of those little signs which, like the
typographical hand prefixed to a notice, are extremely convenient,
though strictly superfluous. It is doubtless unpleasant to have the hard
framework of logical divisions showing too distinctly in an argument, or
to have a too elaborate statement of dates and places and external
relations in a romance. But such aids to the memory may be removed too
freely. The building may be injured in taking away the scaffolding.
Faults of this kind, however, will not explain Landor's failure to get a
real hold upon a large body of readers. Writers of far greater obscurity
and much more repellent blemishes of style to set against much lower
merits, have gained a far wider popularity. The want of sympathy between
so eminent a literary artist and his time must rest upon some deeper
divergence of sentiment. Landor's writings present the same kind of
problem as his life. We are told, and we can see for ourselves, that he
was a man of many very high and many very amiable qualities. He was full
of chivalrous feeling; capable of the most flowing and delicate
courtesy; easily stirred to righteous indignation against every kind of
tyranny and bigotry; capable, too, of a tenderness pleasantly contrasted
with his outbursts of passing wrath; passionately fond of children, and
a true lover of dogs. But with all this, he could never live long at
peace with anybody. He was the most impracticable of men, and every
turning-point in his career was decided by some vehement quarrel. He had
to leave school in consequence of a quarrel, trifling in itself, but
aggravated by 'a fierce defiance of all authority and a refusal to ask
forgiveness.' He got into a preposterous scrape at Oxford, and forced
the authorities to rusticate him. This branched out into a quarrel with
his father. When he set up as a country gentleman at Llanthony Abbey, he
managed to quarrel with his neighbours and his tenants, until the
accumulating consequences to his purse forced him to go to Italy. On the
road thither he began the first of many quarrels with his wife, which
ultimately developed into a chronic quarrel and drove him back to
England. From England he was finally dislodged by another quarrel which
drove him back to Italy. Intermediate quarrels of minor importance are
intercalated between those which provoked decisive crises. The
lightheartedness which provoked all these difficulties is not more
remarkable than the ease with which he threw them off his mind. Blown
hither and thither by his own gusts of passion, he always seems to fall
on his feet, and forgets his trouble as a schoolboy forgets yesterday's
flogging. On the first transitory separation from his wife, he made
himself quite happy by writing Latin verses; and he always seems to have
found sufficient consolation in such literary occupation for vexations
which would have driven some people out of their mind. He would not, he
writes, encounter the rudeness of a certain lawyer to save all his
property; but he adds, 'I have chastised him in my Latin poetry now in
the press.' Such a mode of chastisement seems to have been as completely
satisfactory to Landor as it doubtless was to the lawyer.
His quarrels do not alienate us, for it is evident that they did not
proceed from any malignant passion. If his temper was ungovernable, his
passions were not odious, or, in any low sense, selfish. In many, if not
all, of his quarrels he seems to have had at least a very strong show of
right on his side, and to have put himself in the wrong by an excessive
insistence upon his own dignity. He was one of those ingenious people
who always contrive to be punctilious in the wrong place. It is amusing
to observe how Scott generally bestows upon his heroes so keen a sense
of honour that he can hardly save them from running their heads against
stone walls; whilst to their followers he gives an abundance of shrewd
sense which fully appreciates Falstaff's theory of honour. Scott himself
managed to combine the two qualities; but poor Landor seems to have had
Hotspur's readiness to quarrel on the tenth part of a hair without the
redeeming touch of common-sense. In a slightly different social sphere,
he must, one would fancy, have been the mark of a dozen bullets before
he had grown up to manhood; it is not quite clear how, even as it was,
he avoided duels, unless because he regarded the practice as a Christian
barbarism to which the ancients had never condescended.
His position and surroundings tended to aggravate his incoherencies of
statement. Like his own Peterborough, he was a man of aristocratic
feeling, with a hearty contempt for aristocrats. The expectation that he
would one day join the ranks of the country gentlemen unsettled him as a
scholar; and when he became a landed proprietor he despised his fellow
'barbarians' with a true scholar's contempt. He was not forced into the
ordinary professional groove, and yet did not fully imbibe the
prejudices of the class who can afford to be idle, and the natural
result is an odd mixture of conflicting prejudices. He is classical in
taste and cosmopolitan in life, and yet he always retains a certain
John-Bull element. His preference of Shakespeare to Racine is associated
with, if not partly prompted by, a mere English antipathy to foreigners.
He never becomes Italianised so far as to lose his contempt for men
whose ideas of sport rank larks with the orthodox partridge. He abuses
Castlereagh and poor George III. to his heart's content, and so far
flies in the face of British prejudice; but it is by no means as a
sympathiser with foreign innovations. His republicanism is strongly
dashed with old-fashioned conservatism, and he is proud of a doubtful
descent from old worthies of the true English type. Through all his
would-be paganism we feel that at bottom he is after all a true-born
and wrong-headed Englishman. He never, like Shelley, pushed his quarrel
with the old order to the extreme, but remained in a solitary cave of
Adullam. 'There can be no great genius,' says Penn to Peterborough,
'where there is not profound and continued reasoning.' The remark is too
good for Penn; and yet it would be dangerous in Landor's own mouth; for
certainly the defect which most strikes us, both in his life and his
writings, is just the inconsistency which leaves most people as the
reasoning powers develop. His work was marred by the unreasonableness of
a nature so impetuous and so absorbed by any momentary gust of passion
that he could never bring his thoughts or his plans to a focus, or
conform them to a general scheme. His prejudices master him both in
speculation and practice. He cannot fairly rise above them, or govern
them by reference to general principles or the permanent interests of
his life. In the vulgar phrase, he is always ready to cut off his nose
to spite his face. He quarrels with his schoolmaster or his wife. In an
instant he is all fire and fury, runs amuck at his best friends, and
does irreparable mischief. Some men might try to atone for such offences
by remorse. Landor, unluckily for himself, could forget the past as
easily as he could ignore the future. He lives only in the present, and
can throw himself into a favourite author or compose Latin verses or an
imaginary conversation as though schoolmasters or wives, or duns or
critics, had no existence. With such a temperament, reasoning, which
implies patient contemplation and painful liberation from prejudice, has
no fair chance; his principles are not the growth of thought, but the
translation into dogmas of intense likes and dislikes, which have grown
up in his mind he scarcely knows how, and gathered strength by sheer
force of repetition instead of deliberate examination.
His writings reflect--and in some ways only too faithfully--these
idiosyncrasies. Southey said that his temper was the only explanation of
his faults. 'Never did man represent himself in his writings so much
less generous, less just, less compassionate, less noble in all respects
than he really is. I certainly,' he adds, 'never knew anyone of brighter
genius or of kinder heart.' Southey, no doubt, was in this case
resenting certain attacks of Landor's upon his most cherished opinions;
and, truly, nothing but continuous separation could have preserved the
friendship between two men so peremptorily opposed upon so many
essential points. Southey's criticism, though sharpened by such latent
antagonisms, has really much force. The 'Conversations' give much that
Landor's friends would have been glad to ignore; and yet they present
such a full-length portrait of the man, that it is better to dwell upon
them than upon his poetry, which, moreover, with all its fine qualities,
is (I cannot help thinking) of less intrinsic value. The ordinary
reader, however, is repelled from the 'Conversations' not only by mere
inherent difficulties, but by comments which raise a false expectation.
An easy-going critic is apt to assume of any book that it exactly
fulfils the ostensible aim of the author. So we are told of
'Shakespeare's Examination' (and on the high authority of Charles Lamb),
that no one could have written it except Landor or Shakespeare himself.
When Bacon is introduced, we are assured that the aphorisms introduced
are worthy of Bacon himself. What Cicero is made to say is exactly what
he would have said, 'if he could;' and the dialogue between Walton,
Cotton, and Oldways is, of course, as good as a passage from the
'Complete Angler.' In the same spirit we are told that the dialogues
were to be 'one-act dramas;' and we are informed how the great
philosophers, statesmen, poets, and artists of all ages did in fact pass
across the stage, each represented to the life, and each discoursing in
his most admirable style.