Chapter 7

[1]Massey:History of England, iv. 302. The whole account is founded upon descriptions given byEnglish patriots.

[2]Lalla Rookh: The Fire-worshippers.

[3]"An eloquence rich, wheresoever its waveWander'd free and triumphant, with thoughts that shone through,As clear as the brook's 'stone of lustre,' and gave,the flash of the gem, its solidity too."—Moore:Shall the Harp be silent."Ever glorious Grattan! the best of the good!So simple in heart, so sublime in the rest!With all which Demosthenes wanted endued,And his rival or victor in all he possess'd."—Byron:The Irish Avatar.

"Ever glorious Grattan! the best of the good!So simple in heart, so sublime in the rest!With all which Demosthenes wanted endued,And his rival or victor in all he possess'd."—Byron:The Irish Avatar.

[4]Thomas Moore:Memoirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

[5]Madden:The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times.

[6]"Already has the child of Gallia's school,The foul Philosophy that sins by rule,With all her train of reasoning, damning arts,Begot by brilliant heads or worthless hearts—Already has she poured her poison hereO'er every charm that makes existence dear."—Epistle to Lord Viscount Forbes.

[7]Madden:United Irishmen. Robert Emmet: anonymous, but known to be written by Madame d'Haussonville.

Moore was by nature disposed to gaiety and happiness, not to solitary conflict. He was created to occupy, in the manner of the ancient Irish bards, an honourable place at the table of the great, and while away their time with song. A sign of his being one of fortune's favourites is that he often jests even when he is most in earnest, unlike Byron, who, even when he jests, is serious, nay, gloomy. Moore plays with his theme and caresses it; Byron tears his to pieces, and turns from it in disgust. The two friends are constantly observing and reproducing nature; but under Byron's gaze the sun itself seems to be darkened, whilst Moore, with his love of rosy red and brightness and sparkle, himself creates "a morning sun which rises at noon."

Hence we get but a one-sided picture of Moore when we study him, as our plan has led us to do, chiefly as a political poet. He is also the writer of some of the best and most musical erotic lyrics in existence. The music of his verse is more exuberant than delicate; but there is magic in his handling of language. In his love poems a fascinating, glowing sensuousness and an ardent tenderness have found expression in word-melodies which are as tuneful as airs by Rossini. English admirers of Shelley, accustomed to more delicate, and, to the uninitiated, more perplexing harmonies, may, if they please, call these songs "over-sweet"; erotic verse cannot be too erotic; as the French say: "In love too much is not enough," Moore is no Mozart; but is this not almost like a Mozart air, like one of the hero's or Zerlina's inDon Juan?

"The young May-moon is beaming, love!The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love!How sweet to roveThrough Morna's grove,While the drowsy world is dreaming, love!"

Songs by Rossini and Moore retain their value even though the world owned at the same time a Schubert and a Shelley. Nowhere are the distinguishing characteristics of the different English poets of this period more clearly reflected than in their love poems; whilst at the same time the Naturalism distinguishing the period stands out in sharp contrast to the supernaturalism of the erotic poetry of the German and French reaction periods. Byron's description of his most beautiful female character as "Nature's bride and Passion's child" (Don Juanii. 202), and his description of the love of Don Juan and Haidée:

"This is in others a factitious state,An opium dream of too much youth and reading,But was in them their nature or their fate,"

might serve as characterisations of the love celebrated in the amatory poetry of the majority of his contemporaries. But only inDon Juanhas Byron painted happy love. His erotic poems are nothing but misery and lamentation. The most marvellous of them all, "When we two parted," has a sob in its very rhythm; and the whole pain of parting is conveyed by the manner in which the rhythm suddenly changes in the last verse. In the first lines there is still a certain calmness of passion:

"When we two partedIn silence and tears,Half broken-hearted,To sever for years,Pale grew thy cheek and cold,Colder thy kiss;Truly that hour foretoldSorrow to this.

But all the misery of love is expressed in the short, abrupt cadences of the concluding stanza:

"In secret we met—In silence I grieve,That thy heart could forget,Thy spirit deceive.If I should meet theeAfter long years,How should I greet thee?—With silence and tears."

The peculiar domain of Byronic love-poetry is that of the tortures of love.

Thomas Campbell has not written many purely erotic poems—he prefers the shorter or longer love-story in verse to the personal outburst—but some of the few are as tender in tone as Moore's or Keats's. And, strange to say, he becomes warmer, tenderer, less restrained in expression as time passes. It is as an old man that he writes his most amatory verse. To the remonstrance of conscience, that Platonic friendship should content him at his years, he answers by a challenge to Plato himself in the skies to look into the eyes of a certain lady "and try to be Platonic."

He sings of the transient nature of love, of the suffering occasioned by the absence of the beloved; he puts into words the sufferings of the maid whose lover is "never wedding, ever wooing." But he is most characteristically himself as the erotic poet when he confesses, with a half mournful smile, that his heart is younger than his years, as in the following verses:—

"The god left my heart, at its surly reflections,But came back on pretext of some sweet recollections,And he made me forget what I ought to remember,That the rose-bud of June cannot bloom in November.Ah! Tom, 'tis all o'er with thy gay days—Write psalms, and not songs for the ladies.But time's been so far from my wisdom enriching,That the longer I live, beauty seems more bewitching;And the only new lore my experience traces,Is to find fresh enchantment in magical faces.How weary is wisdom, how weary!When one sits by a smiling young dearie!"

Keats's erotic verse is, as was to be expected, burning, breathless, sensual; it revels in fragrance and sweet sounds. Read this masterly verse:—

"Lift the latch! ah gently! ah tenderly—sweet!We are dead if that latchet gives one little clink!Well done—now those lips, and a flowery seat—The old man may sleep, and the planets may wink;The shut rose shall dream of our loves, and awakeFull blown, and such warmth for the morning's take;The stock-dove shall hatch her soft brace and shall coo,While I kiss to the melody, aching all through."

Shelley's love-poetry is at one and the same time hyper-spiritual and meltingly sensuous. We are reminded by it of Correggio. In the productions of both these artists the expression of the most utter self-surrender is blent with the expression of the most violent sensual excitement; what Shelley describes is the erotic death-struggle. Take the concluding verse of theThe Indian Serenade:—

"Oh lift me from the grass!I die, I faint, I fail!Let thy love in kisses rainOn my lips and eyelids pale.My cheek is cold and white, alas!My heart beats loud and fast;Oh! press it to thine own againWhere it will break at last."

And along with it the transport with whichEpipsychidionconcludes:—

"Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,And our veins beat together; and our lipsWith other eloquence than words, eclipseThe soul that burns between them, and the wellsWhich boil under our being's inmost cells,The fountains of our deepest life, shall beConfused in passion's golden purity,As mountain-springs under the morning Sun.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .One hope within two wills, one will beneathTwo overshadowing minds, one life, one death,One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,And one annihilation. Woe is me!The winged words on which my soul would pierceInto the height of love's rare universe,Are chains of lead around its flight of fire—I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!"

If Byron's domain is that of the tortures of the luckless or forsaken lover, Shelley's is, as we see, that of the pain of the happy lover, of self-annihilation in the rapture of love. But for the very reason that the erotic domain of both these great poets was thus definitely limited, neither of them wrote many erotic poems; to neither was this one of the most important fields of his productivity.

Moore, on the contrary, was a born erotic poet, of the type of our (Danish) Christian Winther. What the majority of love-poets are possessed by is the erotic passion; Moore's distinguishing characteristic is erotic fancy. He loves everything that is beautiful, exquisite, delicate, soft, and bright, for its own sake, without requiring any background to throw it into relief. He never tells any eventful story, never sets off by any strong contrast, never undermines by deep brooding. He loves the blossoms of the tree, not its roots. The objects which fascinate him, fascinate with the first impression; they are beautiful and bright; they dazzle the senses; they enthral the eye and the ear more than the heart; they are exchanged for other objects possessing the same qualities—there is a constant gleam and flutter. But all essentially erotic poets have butterfly natures. In this matter no more striking contrast can be imagined than that between Wordsworth and Moore. The former deliberately chooses themes which in themselves are insignificant, or unattractive, or even ugly, in order to endow them with a moral or spiritual beauty; the latter detests the sordid details of human life, recoils from all its adversities, and evades every moral with a Wieland-like smile and bow. When he is forced to give the ugly a place, he cannot resist casting a soft, glittering veil over it. His style has been blamed for its overweight of gorgeous adjectives, its propensity to let every passion lose itself in a simile, and its restless glitter and gleam. It has been called artificial in comparison with Wordsworth's. "Artificial!" cries one of his Irish admirers, "when every human being can enjoy Moore's poetry, whilst a new taste has to be created to enable one to enjoy Wordsworth's!" Is it really the case, then, we are led to ask, that study and a cultivated taste are required for the enjoyment of the natural, whilst only ordinary feeling is demanded for the enjoyment of artificial beauty? Wordsworth and Coleridge were poets for a cultivated, literary public; Moore was the poet for a nation. The faults with which he may fairly be charged are the consequences of his natural limitations, of his being a musician and a colourist, but not a draughtsman; he is incapable of drawing or describing awholeobject, what he does is to paint the separate attributes of beautiful objects. He devotes verse after verse to the praises of a blush, a smile, the melody of a voice; instead of beautiful outlines he gives us a list of beauties. Employing Voltaire's clever definition of love—"nature's cloth, which imagination has embroidered"—it must be confessed that in Moore's love-poetry the embroidery is often so gorgeous and abundant that it hardly permits the cloth to appear at all. But the cloth is there, and is nature's.

And it is only fair to add that in Moore's best and most beautiful poems the over-abundance of imagery has disappeared. Where the true Irish melancholy has taken possession of his soul, it has blown away all the tinsel and found expression in imperishable language. The style of "Take back the virgin page" and "The last rose of summer" is as simple as their metre is perfect. There is not a simile in either of them. Nor is there a single simile in the beautiful little song which, in spite of its brevity, has for Ireland all the significance of a national epic—the simple song of the lovely young girl who, though adorned with precious jewels and with a beauty still more alluring, went without fear from one end of Ireland to the other, knowing that Erin's sons, "though they love woman and golden store," love honour and virtue more. ("Rich and rare were the gems she wore.") Of the man who wrote such a song Byron might safely assert: "Moore'sIrish Melodieswill go down to posterity with their music; and both will last as long as Ireland or as music and poetry."

Moore's was a happy life. At the age of thirty-one he married a beautiful and amiable girl, Miss Bessy Dyke; and their married life was a most harmonious one. He was not always in good circumstances, but after his fame was established, his works provided him with a handsome income. Though in theGrand Dinner of Type and Co. he makes the rich publishers (in the manner of the legendary warriors who after death drank mead out of the skulls of their enemies) drink their wine out of the skulls of poor authors, he himself had no reason to complain of his publisher, who offered him £3000 forLalla Rookhbefore seeing a line of it, and gave him £4200 for his excellent Life of Lord Byron. Moore was held in equal honour by the Irish and English. In 1818 he was entertained at a banquet in Dublin by all the most famous literary and public men of the country, and when he went to Paris in 1822 he wasfêtedby the British nobility there. It was not till he grew old that misfortunes came upon him. Then he lost his health and had severe trials with his children. He died in 1842.

The poet Thomas Campbell, descended from an ancient Highland family, and born and brought up in Scotland, was, like Scott, an ardent Scottish patriot; he also felt warm sympathy for Ireland, and, like Moore, sang her national memories and sorrows; but he combined love of the two subordinate countries with an ardent and martial British patriotism.

He was, however, not only a national poet in the sense in which Wordsworth was one, but also, from his youth to his death, an enthusiastic lover of liberty. His epic poems and his ballads are not superior to corresponding productions of Wordsworth's; but he had true lyric genius. He is the Tyrtæus or Petöfi of the Naturalistic School. To him the cause of his country and the cause of liberty are one and the same thing, and in his best verse there is a spirit, a swinging march time, and a fire, that entitle him, if only for the sake of half-a-dozen short pieces, to a place among great poets.

His poemThe Battle of the Balticis, naturally, little calculated to make a favourable impression on Danes. His pride in the victory Nelson won over a force so much weaker than his own, but which the poem magnifies into the same size as England's, is the very extravagance of patriotism. But, side by side with this poem, and written at the same time, we haveYe Mariners of England, a masterpiece, in the rhythm of which we seem to hear the gale rattling among English sails. Here the true son of the Queen of the Sea, singing of the British sailor, celebrates his mother's praises.

Notice the rushing, sweeping force and exultation compressed into the last four lines of this stanza:—

"Ye Mariners of England!That guard our native seas;Whose flag has braved a thousand yearsThe battle and the breeze!Your glorious standard launch againTo match another foe!And sweep through the deep,While the stormy winds do blow;While the battle rages loud and long,And the stormy winds do blow.

And observe the expression of pride in England's sovereignty of the sea:—

Britannia needs no bulwarks,No towers along the steep;Her march is o'er the mountain-waves,Her home is on the deep.With thunders from her native oak,She quells the floods below,—As they roar on the shore,When the stormy winds do blow;When the battle rages loud and long,And the stormy winds do blow.

Campbell's life was a well regulated and tranquil one. Born in Glasgow in 1777, he received an excellent education there and in Edinburgh. At the age of twenty-one he published hisPleasures of Hope, which, though now antiquated, created a sensation on its appearance, and with the proceeds undertook a tour in Germany, during the course of which he wrote several poems inspired by the hostilities with Denmark—among them the two above mentioned. In 1803 he married his cousin and settled in London. He wrote, lectured, and from 1820 onwards edited a newspaper. After 1830 his health was precarious and his powers were enfeebled. He lived, a shadow of himself, until 1844.

It is the same with Campbell as with all the other authors of the group to which he belonged—his poetic faculty is based upon the freshness of his receptivity to natural impressions. He has written a poem to the rainbow which, in spite of a rather prosaic and argumentative introduction, is a little masterpiece of simplicity and fancy. He begins by imagining the feelings of "the world's grey fathers" when they came forth to watch its first appearance:—

"And when its yellow lustre smiledO'er mountains yet untrod,Each mother held aloft her childTo bless the bow of God.Methinks, thy jubilee to keep,The first made anthem rangOn earth delivered from the deep,And the first poet sang.Nor ever shall the Muse's eyeUnraptured greet thy beam:Theme of primeval prophecy,Be still the poet's theme!How glorious is thy girdle castO'er mountain, tower, and town,Or mirrored in the ocean vast,A thousand fathoms down!As fresh in yon horizon dark,As young thy beauties seem,As when the eagle from the arkFirst sported in thy beam."

And one of his latest poems,The Dead Eagle, written at Oran in Africa, bears witness to the same, unenfeebled, receptivity to all the phenomena of nature as this early one. In the later work we are conscious of a joy in natural strength and power which is characteristically English. "True" the poet writes:

"True the carr'd aëronaut can mount as high;But what's the triumph of his volant art?A rash intrusion on the realms of air.His helmless vehicle, a silken toy,A bubble bursting in the thunder-cloud;His course has no volition, and he driftsThe passive plaything of the winds. Not suchWas this proud bird: he clove the adverse stormAnd cuff'd it with his wings.He stopp'd his flightAs easily as the Arab reins his steed,And stood at pleasure 'neath heaven's zenith, likeA lamp suspended from its azure dome,Whilst underneath him the world's mountains layLike molehills, and her streams like lucid threads.Then downward, faster than a falling star,He near'd the earth, until his shape distinctWas blackly shadow'd on the sunny ground;And deeper terror hush'd the wilderness,To hear his nearer whoop. Then, up againHe soar'd and wheel'd. There was an air of scornIn all his movements, whether he threw roundHis crested head to look behind him, orLay vertical and sportively display'd,The inside whiteness of his wing declinedIn gyres and undulations full of grace.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .He—reckless who was victor, and aboveThe hearing of their guns—saw fleets engagedIn flaming combat. It was nought to himWhat carnage, Moor or Christian, strew'd their decks.But if his intellect had match'd his wings,Methinks he would have scorn'd man's vaunted powerTo plough the deep; his pinions bore him downTo Algiers the warlike, or the coral grovesThat blush beneath the green of Bona's waves;And traversed in an hour a wider spaceThan yonder gallant ship, with all her sailsWooing the winds, can cross from morn till eve.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The earthquake's selfDisturb'd not him that memorable day,When o'er yon table-land, where Spain had builtCathedrals, cannon'd forts, and palaces,A palsy-stroke of Nature shook Oran,Turning her city to a sepulchre,And strewing into rubbish all her homes."

There is wealth of imagination in this as well as wealth of observation.

But Campbell is greatest in his poetry of freedom, in poems likeMen of England, Stanzas on the Battle of Navarino, Lines on Poland, the Power of Russia, and such noble, profound expressions of spiritual freedom as that entitledHallowed Ground. In such productions as these he plainly shows his spiritual superiority to the poets of the Lake School, who, like him, wrote glorious verse in honour of the nations who were struggling for their independence. The Lake poets honoured the struggle only when it was against the tyranny of Napoleon, England's enemy. Campbell makes no difference of this kind; in the name of freedom he often exhorts and even rebukes England, whereas to the other poets she is freedom's very hearth and home.

Note, inMen of England, the warmth with which he insists that the records of valour in war are as nothing compared with the glowing love of liberty in the breasts of living men, and that the glory of the martyrs of freedom is worth a hundred Agincourts.

Campbell's joy at the liberation of Greece is as genuine as his grief over the fall of Poland; but the poem on Poland is more ardent, in its indignation, its hope, its lament that "England has not heart to throw the gauntlet down." And the verses on the power of Russia display as clear an understanding of the danger to civilisation which lies in the success of Russia, and of the real significance of the defeat of Poland, as if a statesman had turned poet.

"Were this some common strife of States embroil'd;—Britannia on the spoiler and the spoil'dMight calmly look, and, asking time to breathe,Still honourably wear her olive wreath.But this is Darkness combating with Light;Earth's adverse Principles for empire fight."

These are weighty words; and not less pregnant is the line:

"The Polish eagle's fall is big with fate to man."

The poemHallowed Groundis, in its bold simplicity, a plain protest against all superstition, whatever name it bears, and a manly confession of faith in the gospel of liberty as proclaimed by the eighteenth century. What is hallowed ground? asks Campbell:

"What's hallow'd ground? Has earth a clodIts Maker meant not should be trodBy man, the image of his God,Erect and free,Unscourg'd by superstition's rodTo bow the knee?That's hallow'd ground—where, mourn'd and miss'd.The lips repose our love has kiss'd;—But where's their memory's mansion? Is'tYon churchyard's bowers?No! in ourselves their souls exist,A part of ours.A kiss can consecrate the groundWhere mated hearts are mutual bound;The spot where love's first links were wound,That ne'er were riven,Is hallow'd down to earth's profound,And up to heaven!"

And, though the ashes of those who have served mankind may be scattered to the winds, they themselves, he says, live on in men's hearts as in consecrated ground; until the high-priesthood of Peace, Independence, Truth, shall make earth at lastall hallowed ground.

Campbell cannot be numbered among the greatest poets of the Naturalistic School; but in his lyrics there is a simple, powerful, and melodious pathos which reminds us of the old Greek elegiac poets. Although Scotch by birth, his sympathies were with Ireland, and his spirit was British. Although, like the poets of the Lake School, ardently patriotic, he was distinctly the lover and champion of liberty, and of liberty as a divinity, not as an idol. He forms the connecting link between the national poets of Scotland and Ireland and the three great English poet-emigrants of this period.

During the period when England, as a European power, was doing the errands of the Holy Alliance, and within her own borders was oppressing the Roman Catholics and reducing the lower classes to distressful poverty by unduly favouring the landowners, there was a steady increase in the number of Englishmen who left their own country to live the life of knights-errant of freedom, and, as it were, remind the world of England's ancient fame as the protector of national independence. Such Englishmen were General Wilson, who, under Bolivar, liberated South America, and Admiral Cochrane, who won fame first in the Brazilian and then in the Greek war of liberation. And to this class also belongsWalter Savage Landor, the proudest and most singular figure in the literary world of his period.

Landor, born at Warwick in 1775, was the descendant of an ancient family and the heir of princely wealth. He studied at Oxford. In 1802 he resided for a time in Paris. On his return he sold the greater part of his property in Warwickshire and bought one in another county, on which he introduced every possible kind of improvement, to ensure that his numerous tenants should live under more favourable conditions than their class elsewhere in England. He spent £70,000 on these attempts at reform, which he carried out with less understanding of human nature than desire for human welfare. His benevolence was shamefully abused by its recipients, many of whom took advantage of his unselfishness and generosity to defraud him on a large scale. Enraged by the ingratitude and bad behaviour of his tenants, he determined to sell all his property, even the land which had been in the possession of his family for seven hundred years, and to live thenceforward as a free citizen of the world. This resolution he carried out in 1806.

As soon as he heard of the Spanish rebellion against the tyranny of Napoleon, Landor went to Spain, equipped a small troop at his own expense, and fought with the rebels. He received a public letter of thanks from the Spanish Junta, along with a commission as colonel in the Spanish army. This commission he returned when King Ferdinand was restored, with a letter in which he declared that, although he should always be devoted to the cause of Spain, he could have nothing to do with "a perjurer and traitor" like its King. In this one act we have the man's character—precipitate and reckless, but proud and high-minded. In this author's breast beat the heart of an independent chieftain.

In 1815 Landor settled in Italy, where he had his home for nearly thirty years.[1]From 1835 to 1858 he lived in England (at Bath). Throughout his long life—he died in 1864, at the age of 90—he was the mortal enemy of tyranny in all its manifestations, and the ardent champion of freedom in everything. To the last he was the unwearied benefactor of political refugees and persons suffering for their opinions.

The literary activity displayed during this long, honourable life was prodigious. Landor wrote twice as much as Byron. And it is with a feeling of reverence that we open many of his books; but during the whole literary period with which we are immediately concerned, his writings were neither understood nor valued. Landor wrote without any connection with a reading public, and without receiving any encouragement from the critics, who told him nothing but that he was stiff and cold, and that his English was like a translation from a foreign language; he never enjoyed the smallest amount of popularity or any species of literary triumph. After his death he began to be admired, and about 1870 to exercise influence.

To pass from Moore to Landor is like setting foot on firm ground after rocking on the waves. Landor's distinguishing characteristic is a manly decision; he stands high as an author, but higher still as a man. He is, unfortunately, so little read that one cannot presuppose acquaintance with any of his writings, or find any point of support in the memory or fancy of one's reader on which to base criticisms; and he is not easy to describe. His decision found its most remarkable expression in an estimate of himself which is startling to many. We come upon such verdicts as this: "What I write is not written upon a slate: and no finger, not of Time himself, who dips it in the clouds of years, can efface it"; and upon such answers to the reviewers of hisImaginary Conversationsas: "Let the sturdiest of them take the ten worst of them, and if he equals them in ten years I will give him a hot wheaten roll and a pint of brown stout for breakfast." Such pride would have made a smaller man ridiculous, but it does not harm Landor; it occasionally becomes him. It reminds us at times of the not unjustifiable, but uncontrollably arrogant feeling which Schopenhauer had of his own deserts, only that Landor's manner is always that of the refined aristocrat, whilst Schopenhauer, with his utter disregard of the laws of common politeness, is a thorough plebeian. And on rare occasions the peculiar temperament, with its grand passionateness and its even grander productivity, reminds us of a man whose name is too great to be lightly named, but who, though infinitely Landor's intellectual superior, would perhaps have acknowledged the intellectual kinship—the solitary, severe Michael Angelo.

There was something severe in Landor's nature—the severity which goes along with firmness of character and absolute truthfulness to one's self and others. In his work there is a certain salutary harshness. The poem "Hyperbion," from theHellenics, may be given as a good and very characteristic example of it.

"Hyperbion was among the chosen fewOf Phœbus; and men honored him awhile,Honoring in him the God. But others sangAs loudly; and the boys as loudly cheer'd.Hyperbion (more than bard should be) was wroth,And thus he spake to Phœbus: 'Hearest thou,O Phœbus, the rude rabble from the field,Who swear that they have known thee ever sinceThou feddest for Admetus his white bull?''I hear them,' said the God. 'Seize thou the first,And haul him up above the heads of men,And thou shalt hear them shout for thee as pleas'd.'Headstrong and proud Hyperbion was: the crownOf laurel on it badly cool'd his brow:So, when he heard them singing at his gate,While some with flints cut there the rival's name,Rushing he seized the songster at their head:The songster kickt and struggled hard, in vain.Hyperbion claspt him round with arm robust,And with the left a hempen rope uncoil'd,Whereon already was a noose: it heldThe calf until its mother's teat was drawnAt morn and eve; and both were now afield.With all his strength he pull'd the wretch along,And haul'd him up a pine-tree, where he died.But one night, not long after, in his sleepHe saw the songster: then did he beseechApollo to enlighten him, if perchanceIn what he did he had done aught amiss.'Thou hast done well, Hyperbion!' said the God,'As I did also to one MarsyasSome years ere thou wert born: but better 'twereIf thou hadst understood my words aright,For those around may harm thee, and assignAs reason that thou wentest past the law.My meaning was that thou shouldst hold him upIn the high places of thy mind, and showThyself the greater by enduring him.'Downcast Hyperbion stood: but Phœbus said:'Be of good cheer, Hyperbion! if the ropeIs not so frayed but it may hold thy calf,The greatest harm is, that, by hauling him,Thou hast chafed sorely, sorely, that old pine;And pine-tree bark will never close again.'"

Seldom has an Apollo expressed himself in a less sickly-sentimental manner on the subject of mediocrity in art. Landor's contempt for it was based on the severity of the artistic demands he made on himself. He is the severest stylist among English prose writers—not stylist in the sense of virtuoso in language, for no English is less flexible than his—but in this sense, that he represents all his characters, the most commonplace and the grandest, the ancient and the modern, in the same simple Attic style. To his marked preference for the heroic and the grand is due the majestic tranquillity which as a rule characterises hisConversations(the branch of literature he specially cultivated); the dialogue is Grecian in its beautiful simplicity, Anglo-Roman in its proud decision. His style is pure, correct, concise; and its antique quality specially fits it for the representation of ancient Greek and Roman characters. The public assemblies in the market-place of Athens, the Senate and Forum of Rome, these live in hisConversationswith the life of their own day. Modern dialogue flowed much less easily and naturally from his pen; he was successful in the more modernConversationsonly when the situation was of such a nature as to be receptive of life and warmth from his own concealed indignation.

To make acquaintance with Landor in his full vigour and brilliancy one must read hisPericles and Aspasia, a tale in epistolary form. It is a work of the same description as Wieland'sAristippus, but written in a very different spirit and style. Where Wieland is florid and coquettish, Landor is distinguished by manly grace; where Wieland is sentimental, Landor is noble and proud. This correspondence is chiselled rather than written; it represents Pericles as the republican type of noble humanity and political wisdom; and in it Aspasia is not the hetæra, but a personification of Hellenic beauty and delicacy of feeling, of pagan womanhood, and of the emancipated antique intellect and culture. There is consequently not a trace of anything resembling coquetry in the letters; everything that is small and undignified seems to lie beyond the horizon of the work and its author. But the old-fashioned epistolary form and the length of the letters make the book tedious, and the reader who has not enough patience for it will do well to turn from it to Landor's masterpiece, the Conversation between Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa.

This Conversation is inferior to a dialogue of Plato only in profundity of thought; it rivals Plato in grace, in revelation of character, and in naturalness. The amiable philosopher, now approaching middle-age, is walking in his beautiful garden with two young Greek girls, talking of the trivial events of the day and the serious events of life. An Attic atmosphere, a dignified sensuousness, a chaste and charming grace, distinguish the whole scene, striking us perhaps most in the little touches which describe the two girls, particularly the younger, aged sixteen, with her mixture of bashfulness and attractive straightforwardness. Landor has here created the feminine counterpart of Plato's youths; he has discovered the Greek maiden, whom Plato neglected, whom Greek tragedy represented only in solemn or majestically tragic situations, and whose outward appearance alone has been preserved for us in beautiful reliefs.

One is well repaid for one's trouble in following the windings of this Conversation. It begins with a pretty description of the surrounding scene, and with praise of the solitude which is necessary to the man who desires to think, and to write his thoughts. Behind the figure of Epicurus we here catch a glimpse of Landor, who had this same love of a retired life, at a distance from the traffic and noise of the busy world. (See Conversation between Southey and Landor.) Then Epicurus discusses playfully and charmingly with Ternissa the question whether the myth of Boreas, Zethes, and Caläis is to be accepted literally or not, whilst the elder girl teases Ternissa because of her credulousness. After this the Conversation, touching lightly for a moment on the delicious scent of the vine-leaves and on the new olive plantations, turns into an affecting, profound discussion on the fear of death. The calm, dignified attitude of Epicurus arouses the girls' admiration, and leads them violently to upbraid those who condemn and persecute him as an atheist. It comes out that Leontion has written a whole book for the purpose of refuting the charges against him made by Theophrastus. Epicurus proves to her with gentle dignity how useless replies to such attacks are, and explains to her why he will contend with no one. "I would not contend even with men able to contend with me.... Whom should I contend with? The less? it were inglorious. The greater? it were vain." Here we perceive Landor himself again. This was the very argument of the man who a few years before his death prefixed to his last book the motto:

"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art;I warmed both hands before the fire of life;It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

The first of these lines contains both a confession and a justification of what appeared to be his arrogance—that which small minds found it so difficult to understand or to pardon. The second tells what was the chief subject of his earnest study, and what, supplementing it, came next in order. The third line is an expression of the noble philosophy which supported and nourished his spirit under so much misunderstanding and opposition; and the last shows him prepared, with the quiet dignity which harmonised with his character, to fold his mantle round him and depart when his time came.[2]

Leontion continues the Conversation. "The old," she says, "are all against you, for the name of pleasure is an affront to them: they know no other kind of it than that which has flowered and seeded, and of which the withered stems have indeed a rueful look. What we call dry they call sound; nothing must retain any juice in it: their pleasure is in chewing what is hard, not in tasting what is savoury." Landor, who had to submit to reproaches for the licentiousness of his writings even from Byron (see preface toA Vision of Judgment), evidently derives his philosophy, as John Stuart Mill did his system of morality, from Epicurus, the pagan.

The Conversation passes lightly from one subject to another; now it turns on Ternissa's blushes at the remembrance of the statues of satyrs and fauns in the bath chamber, now on Leontion's feminine objections to Aristotle and Theophrastus. It concludes in a genuinely Greek, Epicurean, erotic manner; Epicurus and Ternissa act the scene between Peleus and Thetis, which ends with a kiss.

In this Conversation we have Landor's art and his tranquil humanism at their best. But when we turn to the modern Conversations we become acquainted with the soldier in him, the writer ever armed, ever ready for the fray, who, assuming a thousand different disguises, exposes and strikes at every form of falsehood and oppression which challenges him to the attack in his character of pagan, republican, and philanthropist. In his 125Imaginary Conversationshe roams, displaying an astonishing amount of information, over the whole face of the earth—from London to China, from Paris to the South Sea Islands; and throughout the whole of history—from Cicero to Bossuet, from Cromwell to Petrarch, from Tasso to Talleyrand; in every country and every age uttering a vigorous protest against tyranny, and speaking a word, sharp as a sword, in the cause of liberty. We overhear what the Empress Catharine and her favourite maid of honour say to each other while they are in the act of murdering the former's husband; and the Conversation in question is not much inferior to one of Vitet's incomparable historical scenes, which are models in this style. We hear Louis XVIII, talking politics with the supercilious, polished Talleyrand, and notice how the uncontrollable longing for plenty of pheasants and pheasants' eggs twines itself, like a scarlet thread, through the web of all His Majesty's political plans. We listen to General Kleber talking with his staff-officers in Egypt, and are conscious of the dissatisfaction with Napoleon's tyrannical measures which runs, like a subdued murmur, through all they say. We are present at the assassination of Kotzebue, and hear Sandt, in the course of his attempts to induce Kotzebue to quit the path he is treading, pronounce his own acquittal.

It was an article of Landor's political creed that the oppressor ought to fall by the sword. All his life he advocated the death of tyrants; he was not afraid openly to express his wish that Napoleon III. might be assassinated. He was a friend and spiritual kinsman of the great European revolutionists who, with Mazzini at their head, had sworn implacable enmity to the oppressors of the nations. But it is not only as a politician that Landor shoots beyond the mark; by far the greater number of his historical Conversations suffer from the too open pursuit of some aim of his own. We are always catching sight of Landor himself. Take, for example, his representation of Catharine of Russia at the terrible moment above referred to: Landor cannot resist seizing the opportunity to discourse, in the disguise of Princess Dashkoff, on the ungodliness of Voltaire's character and the immorality of hisPucelle, with the aim of impressing upon us what a bad influence the French spirit had upon Russia. For with all his liberal-mindedness he is sufficiently the Englishman of his day to lay the blame of everything bad on France, and never to represent a Frenchman in any but a ridiculous or contemptible light. When, for example, he writes a Conversation between Louis XVIII, and Talleyrand, he cannot refrain from making his satire so severe—Louis' foolish speeches so imbecile, Talleyrand's tone to his sovereign so ironical—that no one can believe in the historic truthfulness of the whole. Landor desires to hear the English and Wellington praised, and desires to have Louis' incapacity plainly shown, and he is rash enough to put both the eulogy of England and the mockery of Louis into the mouth of the judicious French courtier.

In the handling of the weapons of satire, Landor might have learned much from the Frenchmen whom he disliked so heartily. But he had as great a contempt for their literature as for their politics, and despised Voltaire, the author, quite as much as Voltaire, the man. In the Conversation between himself and the Abbé Delille he uses, as a critic of French tragedy, even severer language than Lessing, and shows no more appreciation than Lessing did of the great stylistic capacity inherent in the characteristically French intellect. It strikes us as comical to hear one man reproaching another with the utmost insolence for being too polished.

One hardly needs to be told that a man with this opinion of French classic poetry was a despiser of Pope, an enthusiastic admirer of Milton, and a pronounced supporter of the reform of English poetry demanded by Wordsworth. Most of the Conversations upon literary topics are written for the purpose of eulogising Wordsworth and Southey, and reproaching the reading public for its want of appreciation of such fine poetry as theirs.[3]Keats and Shelley are also warmly praised; and Landor expresses regret that he had not made the personal acquaintance of either, and, in particular, that a false report concerning Shelley's behaviour to his first wife had kept him from calling upon that poet at Pisa. He writes of Shelley that he "united, in just degrees, the ardour of the poet with the patience and forbearance of the philosopher," and that "his generosity and charity went far beyond those of any man at present in existence." But no sooner is Byron mentioned than Landor expresses himself exactly like a poet of the Lake School. The man who believed that the two fingers which held his pen had more power than the two Houses of Parliament (see conclusion of the Conversation between Landor and Marchese Pallavicini) could never forget Byron's satire of hisGebir. And the remarkable friendship existing, in spite of all their political and religious differences, between him and Southey, made it equally impossible for him to forget the blows which Byron had struck at his admirer. Byron's egotism and excitable restlessness were, undoubtedly, antipathetic to Landor, but it was the treatment of Southey which influenced him most, and blinded him to many of the great poet's best qualities. The connection with Southey is, on the whole, little creditable to Landor, and Forster's longLife of Landoris rendered the more unreadable by the disproportionate space allotted in it to letters from and to such an uninteresting personage as Southey. In Landor's eyes Southey had the great, and certainly rare, merit of being one of the two persons who had read and bought the poemGebirwhen it came out. De Quincey, who was the other, tells that in his youth he was hooted in the streets of Oxford as the one reader of that poem in the University. So we can understand how Southey, who not only bought and read, but praised it, and who, moreover, wrote a favourable review of Landor's dullCount Julianin theQuarterly, must have seemed to the self-satisfied author a man of the rarest intellectual penetration.

It is undeniable thatGebir, in spite of all its passionate republicanism, is a stilted, valueless composition, which bears evident traces of having been, by a characteristic whim of its author, first written in Latin verse. There was, throughout, a Latin quality in Landor's verse. Even Gosse, who admires it, feels obliged to confess that its character, like the taste of olives, is peculiar enough to acquit any person who does not like it of the charge of affectation. It is in his prose alone that his strength lies.

But a writer whose poetry is lacking in charm of expression and lyric soul, whose dramas were neither played nor read, and who found his true province in lengthy prose dialogue, spoken in all parts of the world and at all periods of history, but unconnected with any play—such a writer could not, however noble his principles and unmistakable his Radicalism, be the man to bring about a general European revulsion to liberal opinions. He repelled by his whimsicalities and crotchets, of which such instances may be given as his defence of the burning of Rome by Nero as a hygienic measure, his characterisation of Pitt as a mediocrity, and Fox as a charlatan, or, greatest absurdity of all, his advice to the Greeks, during their struggle with the Turks, to give up the use of firearms and resort to their old weapon, the bow. He was too peculiar and too much of the solitary to have admirers and imitators; he was too incomprehensible by the ordinary mind to exercise any influence upon the general public; his virtues contributed as much as his faults—his wild manliness as much as his excessive self-sufficiency—to render him unapproachable. And if he was incapable of compromising like Moore, that is to say, of ever becoming a Whig poet, he was equally incapable of ever imparting to his Radicalism a poetic form that would entrance and captivate a whole reading public. His partial understanding of the great modern movements in religion, government, and society, entitles him to be grouped with two younger and greater men, Shelley and Byron. He fought for his ideals like a brave and proud republican soldier; but he was neither fitted to be a general nor to submit to rule; and he had not the power of inspiring a multitude of other minds.[4]

The eldest of the three freedom-loving exiles, he outlived the other two—lived so long, indeed, that he became the contemporary of an entirely different generation of English poets. Browning was his friend; Swinburne's cordial admiration sweetened the last years of his life; the dedication ofAtalantashows the young man's feelings towards the old. Landor's great shade, extending one hand to Wordsworth, the other to Swinburne, seems to hover over the whole poetic development of England during a period of not less than eighty years.

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