The Poetry of Landor

LANDOR has said, not speaking; of himself, —

And of himself he has said, in perhaps his most memorable lines, —

In the preface to the Heroic Idyls he writes: “He who is within two paces of the ninetieth year may sit down and make no excuses; he must be unpopular, he never tried to be much otherwise, he never contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far eastern uplands, meditating and remembering.” He remains alone in English literature, to which he brought, in verse and prose, qualities of order and vehemence, of impassioned thinking and passionless feeling, not to be found combined except in his own work. And in the man there was a like mingling of opposites: nobility and tenderness, haste and magnanimity, courtesy and irresponsible self-will, whatever is characteristically English and whatever is characteristically Roman, with the defects of every quality. Landor is monumental by the excess of his virtues, which are apt to seem, at times, a little too large for the stage and scenery of his life. He desired to live with grandeur; and there is grandeur in the outlines of his character and actions. But some gust of the will, some flurry of the nerves, was always at hand, to trouble or overturn this comely order. The ancient Roman becomes an unruly child, the scholar flings aside cap and gown and leaps into the arena.

Landor began to write verse when he was a schoolboy, and it is characteristic of him that poetry came to him first as a school exercise, taken for once seriously. Latin was to him, it has been well said, “like the language of some prior state of existence, rather remembered than learned.” His first book, published at the age of twenty, contains both Latin and English verse, together with a defense, in Latin, of the modern use of that language. When, a few years later, he began to work upon his first serious poem, Gebir, he attempted it both in Latin and in English, finally decided to write it in English, and, later on, turned it also into Latin.

Gebir was published in 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads, and, in its individual way, it marks an epoch almost as distinctly. No blank verse of comparable calibre had appeared since the death of Milton, and, though the form was at times actually reminiscent both of Milton and of the Latin structure of some of the portions as they were originally composed, it has a quality which still remains entirely its own. Cold, sensitive, splendid, so precise, so restrained, keeping step with such a stately music, scarcely any verse in English has a more individual harmony, more equable, more refreshingly calm to the ear. It contains those unforgettable lines, which can never be too often repeated: —

There are in it single lines like, —

and there are lines marching like these:

Has not that the tread of the Commander in Don Juan? And there are experiments in a kind of naïveté: —

Tennyson is anticipated here: —

Mr. Swinburne here: —

But where the most intimately personal quality of Landor is seen is in the lofty homeliness of speech which is always definite, tangible, and about definite, tangible things. The Gadites are building, and Landor, remembering the workmen he has seen in the streets of Warwick, notes: —

Gebir is wrestling with the nymph, who sweats like any mortal; Landor does not say so, but he sets her visibly before us, —

We are far enough from Milton here; not so far, perhaps,from the Latin precision of statement; but certainly close to reality.

And it is reality of a kind new to English poetry, — painter’s, sculptor’s, reality,— discovered, as we have seen, at precisely the moment when Wordsworth was discovering for himself the reality of simple feeling, and Coleridge the reality of imaginative wonder.

A few years after Gebir, Landor published two poems, “Chrysaor ” and “ The Phocæans,” and then, for many years, at long intervals, wrote, and occasionally published, other poems, in Latin and English, which were eventually to make up the Idyllia Heroica and the Hellenics. They are, to use a word which Browning was to invent (having learned the thing, perhaps, from Landor), dramatic idyls. The most perfect of them, “The Death of Artemidora,” is only nineteen lines long; “The Last of Ulysses” fills fiftyfive pages in the edition of 1847. Landor never ceased to shift their places, and to add, reject, and, above all, rewrite. The two essentially different texts are those of 1847 and 1859; and it is necessary to compare these with each other, and both with such as exist also in Latin, if we would trace with any care the diligent and never quite final labor which Landor gave to his verse.

In the poems which Landor twice translated from his own Latin, it is not often that either form of the English is quite as good as the Latin, and it is not always easy to choose between the two versions, of which the first is usually more easy and fluent, while the second, though more Latin, is often more personal to Landor. Often the second version is nearer to the original, as in the opening of “Coresus and Callirrhoë,” where the two lines, —

are first rendered: —

and afterwards: —

Sometimes the earlier version is the more literal, but the later one gains by condensation. Thus the first eight lines of “Cupid and Pan ” follow closely the first six lines of “Cupido et Pan,” while the version of 1859, reduced to six lines, omits, without loss, a line of the Latin which had filled nearly three lines of the English. This process of condensation will be seen in lines 140-141 of “Coresus et Callirrhoë,”

rendered literally in 1847,—

and in 1859 condensed into the single line, —

The aim is always at adding more weight, in the clearing away of mere detail, with only an occasional strong addition, as, a few lines lower, “Less mournfully than scornfully said he,” for the mere “ inquit ” of the original. The style stiffens into harder marble in its “rejection of what is light and minute.”

Alike from what is gained and from what is lost in this recasting we see how uncertain, with all his care, was Landor’s touch on English verse, how a Latin sound dominated his ears when he was writing English, and how his final choice of form was almost invariably of the nature of a compromise, like that of one to whom his native tongue was foreign. Compare the two versions of lines 30-34 of “Veneris Pueri:” —

In 1847 “The Children of Venus” reads: —

In 1859 “The Boys of Venus” reads: —

Both versions are fine, though the second, trying to follow the Latin more closely line for line, abandons the freer cadences of the first; but is either wholly without a certain constraint, which we do not feel in even those passages of Milton most like Latin? And is there not, when we read the lines in Latin, a sense, not due to mere knowledge of the fact, that we are reading an original after a translation ?

Yet it is to this fact, partly, to this Latin savor in English, that not only those poems of Landor which were first written in Latin, but others also, never written in anything but English, owe their exceptional, evasive, almost illegitimate charm. What, we find ourselves saying, is this unknown, exquisite thing, which yet seems to be not quite poetry, or is certainly unlike anything else in English poetry? A perfume clings about it, as if it had been stored for centuries in cedar chests, and among spices. Nor does it fail to respond to its own appeal: —

I have read the Hellenics, lying by the seashore, on warm, quiet days when I heard nothing but the monotonous repetition of the sea at my feet, and they have not seemed out of key. The music is never full-throated or organ music, but picked out note by note on a reed-pipe, a slender sound with few intervals. And it is with truth that Landor says, in the preface to the edition of 1859, “Poetry, in our day, is oftener prismatic than diaphanous: this is not so: they who look into it may see through. If there be anywhere a few small air-bubbles, it yet leaves to the clear vision a wide expanse of varied scenery.”

In his first preface, in 1847, Landor had written: “ It is hardly to be expected that ladies and gentlemen will leave on a sudden their daily promenade, skirted by Turks and shepherds and knights and plumes and palfreys, of the finest Tunbridge manufacture, to look at these rude frescoes, delineated on an old wall high up, and sadly weak in colouring. As in duty bound, we can wait. The reader (if there should be one) will remember that Sculpture and Painting have never ceased to be occupied with the scenes and figures which we venture once more to introduce into poetry, it being our belief that what is becoming in two of the Fine Arts is not quite unbecoming in a third, the one which indeed gave birth to them.” The Hellenics are all in low relief; you can touch their surface, but not walk round them. Some are moulded in clay, some carved in marble; all with the same dispassionate and energetic skill of hand, the same austere sense of visible beauty. They do not imitate the variety and movement of life; they resemble the work of Flaxman rather than the work of Greek sculpture, and have the careful charm of the one rather than the restrained abundance of the other. They wish to be taken for what they are, figures in relief, harmoniously arranged, not without a reasonable decorative likeness to nature. The contours which have arrested them are suave, but a trifle rigid; the design has proportion, purity, rarely breadth or intensity. The planes are never obscured or unduly heightened; no figure, suddenly starting into life, throws disarray among the firmly stationed or sedately posed figures around.

With all his care, Landor rarely succeeds in seeming spontaneous; the fastidiousness of the choice is too conspicuous, and wounds the susceptibilities of the mind, as one who too obviously “picks and chooses” wounds the susceptibilities of a host or a friend. His touch, above all things sensitive, sometimes misses the note; in evading the brutality of statement, he sometimes leaves his meaning half expressed.

It is not without some intent deciphering that any one will realize from these hints that the passage of three years is meant to be indicated in them. Landor prefers to give you a sort of key, which he expects you to fit in the lock, and turn there; there is disdain in his way of stopping short, as with a half courteous and half contemptuous gesture. For the most part he hints at what has happened by mentioning an unimportant, but visible, consequence of it.

Landor’s chief quality is sensitiveness; and this is seen equally in his touch on verse and in the temper of his daily life. The root of irritability is sensitiveness; and sensitiveness is shown by Landor when he throws the cook out of the window upon the flower-bed, and not only when he remembers that he has “forgotten the violets.” All his prejudices, unreasons, the occasional ungentlemanliness of his enraged caprices, come from this one source. We trace it in his attitude of angry contempt toward Byron: “ ‘Say what you will,’ once whispered a friend of mine, ‘there are things in him strong as poison, and original as sin.’ ” We trace it in his refusal to call on Shelley, when the poet, whom he admired profoundly, was his neighbor in Pisa. He marries precipitately, at the sight of “ the nicest girl in the room,” at a provincial ball; and leaves his wife in Jersey, to cross over to France, alone in an open boat, because she has reminded him before her sister that he is older than she is. Throughout life his bluster was the loud, assumed voice of a sensitive nature, hurt to anger by every imperfection that disconcerted his taste.

And sensitiveness makes his verse shrink away from any apparent self-assertion, all in little shivers, like the nymph’s body at the first cold touch of the river. He heard a music which seemed to beat with too definite a measure, and he often draws back his finger from the string before he has quite sounded the note, so fearful is he lest the full twang should be heard. The words pause half-uttered; what they say is never more than a part of what they mean, as the tune to which they say it always supposes a more ample melody completing it behind the silence. In that familiar ending of “The Death of Artemidora,”—

we find this shy reticence, which from an idiosyncrasy has become almost a method.

Landor was a scholar of beauty, and it was with almost too disinterested an homage, too assured at once and too shy, that he approached the Muses. “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence,” and poetry wants to be wooed by life. Landor was not a strong man; he was a loud weak man; in his life we see the tumult, and only in his verse “the depth and not the tumult of the soul.” His work is weakness made marmoreal; the explosive force tamed, indeed, but tamed too well, showing the lack of inner fire, so busy with rocks and lava on the surface. That is why it becomes tedious after a little; because life comes and goes in it but capriciously, like the shooting flames of his life; it is not warmed steadily throughout.

Something of this may have been in Coleridge’s mind when he said, in the Table-Talk of January 1, 1834, “What is it that Mr. Landor wants, to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form, — that of stamping il più nell’ uno. Hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness.” And he adds, “Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid English.”

Is it, really, imagination which he lacks ? In some lines addressed to Barry Cornwall, Landor states his own theory:

Landor holds in the string so tight that the kite never soars to the end of its tether. In one of his many fits of “the pride that apes humility,” he writes: —

He was, indeed, averse to both froth and fire, and there is nothing of either in his temperate and lofty work. Yet there are times when he lets his Muse grow a little thin on an Arab fare, dates and water, in his dread of letting her enter “Literature’s gin-palaces.”

It is in Landor’s dramatic work that we see, perhaps more clearly than elsewhere, the point beyond which he could not go, though nowhere else in his work do we see more clearly his nobility of attitude and his command of grave and splendid verse. Landor’s method in dialogue is a logical method; the speeches are linked by a too definite and a too visible chain; they do not spring up out of those profound, subconscious affinities, which, in the work of the great dramatists, mimic nature with all her own apparent irregularity. Coleridge, writing of The Tempest, has noticed in Shakespeare, with deep insight: “One admirable secret of his art is, that separate speeches frequently do not appear to have been occasioned by those which preceded, and which are onsequent upon each other, but to have arisen out of the peculiar character of the speaker.” How minutely Landor follows the mechanical regularity of logic and association of ideas will be seen if we turn to almost any page of his dramas. In the second scene of the second act of Count Julian, one speech of Julian’s ends: “Remember not our country;” and Covilla echoes, —

She dwells on her desire of her own country, and Julian continues, rather than replies, —

Covilla responds in the same key, and ends her speech with the words, —

It is now Julian who becomes the echo:—

Nature and virtue! they shall perish first. His long speech ends with a reflection that the villagers, if they came among them, —

Covilla instantly catches the word “pity,” and replies, —

Landor, to forestall criticism, tells us that Count Julian is “rather a dialogue than a drama;” but it adopts the dramatic form, and even the form of French drama, in which the entrance of a new speaker begins a new scene. It could very well be presented by marionettes with sonorous voices, speaking behind the scenes. Landor never sees his people; they talk unmoved, or enunciate a sudden emotion with unnatural abruptness. The verse is too strict and stem, within measured Miltonic limits, for dramatic speech, or even for lifelike dialogue; thus: —

Yet there are moments when the Miltonic speech becomes, as it can become, nakedly dramatic: —

To Landor his own people were very real; and he says, “I brought before me the various characters, their forms, complexions, and step. In the daytime I laboured , and at night unburdened my mind, shedding many tears.” But between this consciousness of a step heard in the mind, and a working knowledge of the movement of an actor across the stage, there is a great gulf; and Landor never crossed it. He aimed at producing the lofty effect of Greek tragedy, but in reading Sophocles he seems never to have realized the unerring, the infinitely ingenious playwright, to whom speech is first of all the most direct means of setting his characters to make his plot. Landor endows each of his characters with a few unvarying sentiments, and when several characters meet in action they do but give dignified expression, each as if speaking by himself, to those sentiments. The clash of wills, which makes drama, may be loud enough somewhere off the stage, but here it is but “recollected in tranquillity.”

Landor is a great master of imagery, and in Count Julian there are many lines like these: —

Note how precise, how visual (in his own remote, sumptuous way), is the image; and how scrupulous the exactitude of the thought rendered by the image. But the image is, after all, no more than just such an ornamentation of “gryphens and eagles, ivory and gold” to a thought separately clear in itself. The image is not itself the most vital part of the speech. Take, again, the speech of Julian to Roderigo, in which an image is used with more direct aim at dramatic effect: —

In my copy of the first collected edition of Landor’s poems some one has marked these last two lines; and they are striking lines. But let us open Shakespeare, and read, say, this: —

Here the superb epithet, “that angel of the world,” which seems to interrupt a straightforward speech, heightens it with meaning. The “torn banner on the chapel’s roof” is only a decoration; it shows self-consciousness in the speaker, who thinks aside, in an unlikely way, and for effect.

In the later plays and scenes, in “ The Siege of Ancona,” and in the “Beatrice Cenci,” most notably, Landor seems to have more nearly mastered the dramatic method, partly by limiting himself to briefer and less complicated action; and he has finally adopted a style which is at once more flexible and more beautiful. In “The Siege of Ancona ” there is a note of almost homely heroism which comes to one with a direct thrill; in “Beatrice Cenci” there is both pity and terror; a deep tenderness in the scene between Beatrice and Margarita, and, in the last, scene, where the citizens, “at a distance from the scaffold,” hear the groans of Beatrice under torture, and suffer indignant agonies with each groan, a profound and almost painful beauty, at times finding relief in such lines as these:—

In some of the briefer scenes, those single conversations in which Landor could be so much more himself than in anything moving forward from scene to scene, there are lines that bite as well as shine; such lines as those of the drunken woman who has drowned her child: —

It is, after all, for their single lines, single speeches, separate indications of character (the boy Cæsarion in “Antony and Octavius,” the girl Erminia in “ The Siege of Ancona,” a strain of nobility in the Consul, of honesty in Gallus, Inez de Castro at the moment of her death), that we remember these scenes. If we could wholly forget much of the rest, the “rhetoric-roses,” not always “supremely sweet,” though “the jar is full,” the levity without humor, and, for the most part, without grace, the “giggling” women (he respects the word, and finds it, in good Greek, in Theocritus), the placid arguing about emotions, his own loss of interest, it would seem, in some of these pages as he wrote them, we might make for ourselves in Landor what Browning in a friendly dedication calls him, “a great dramatic poet,” and the master of a great and flawless dramatic style.

There is another whole section of Landor’s work, consisting of epigrams and small poems, more numerous, perhaps, than any English poet since Herrick has left us. Throughout his life he persistently versified trifles, as persistently as Wordsworth, but with a very different intention. Wordsworth tries to give them a place in life, so to speak, talking them, as anecdotes or as records of definite feelings; while Landor snatches at the feeling or the incident as something which may be cunningly embalmed in verse, with almost a funereal care. Among these poems which he thus wrote there are immortal successes, such as “Dirce” or “Rose Aylmer,” with many memorable epitaphs and epitomes, and some notable satires. By their side there is no inconsiderable number of petty trivialities, graceful nothings, jocose or sentimental trifles. With a far less instinctive sense of the capacities of his own language than Herrick, Landor refused to admit that what might make a poem in Latin could fail to be a poem in English. He won over many secrets from that close language; but the ultimate secrets of his own language he never discovered. Blake, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, among his contemporaries, could all do something that he could not do, something more native, more organically English, and therefore of a more absolute beauty as poetry. He reads Pindar for his “ proud complacency and scornful strength. If I could,” he says, “resemble him in nothing else, I was resolved to be as compendious and as exclusive.” From Catullus he learned more, and his version of one of the lighter poems of Catullus has its place to-day, as if it were an original composition, among the mass of his collected lyrics, where it is not to be distinguished from the pieces surrounding it. Yet, if you will compare any of Landor’s translations, good as they are, with the original Latin, you will see how much of the energy has been smoothed out, and you will realize that, though Catullus in Landor’s English is very like Landor’s English verse, there is something, of infinite importance, characteristic alike of Catullus and of poetry, which has remained behind, uncapturable.

Is it that, in Coleridge’s phrase, “he does not possess imagination in its highest form ? ” Is it that, as I think, he was lacking in vital heat ?

No poet has ever been a bad prose writer, whenever he has cared to drop from poetry into prose; but it is doubtful whether any poet has been quite so fine, accomplished, and persistent a prosewriter as Landor. “ Poetry,” he tells us, in one of his most famous passages, “was always my amusement, prose my study and business. I have published five volumes of Imaginary Conversations: cut the worst of them thro’ the middle, and there wall remain in this decimal fraction quite enough to satisfy my appetite for fame. I shall dine late; but the diningroom will be well lighted, the guests few and select.” Without his prose Landor is indeed but half, if he is half, himself. His verse at its best has an austere nobility, a delicate sensitiveness, the qualities of marble or of onyx. But there is much also which is no more than a graceful trifling, the verse of a courtly gentleman, who, as he grows older, takes more and more assiduous pains in the shaping and polishing of compliments. It is at its best when it is most personal, and no one has written more nobly of himself, more calmly, with a more lofty tenderness for humanity seen in one’s small, private looking-glass. But the whole man never comes alive into the verse, body and soul, but only as a stately presence.

He has put more of himself into his prose, and it is in the prose mainly that we must seek the individual features of his soul and temperament. Every phrase comes to us with the composure and solemnity of verse, but with an easier carriage under restraint. And now he is talking, with what for him is an eagerness and straightforwardness in saying what he has to say, — the “ beautiful thoughts ” never “disdainful of sonorous epithets.” And you discover that, he has much more to say than the verse has quite fully hinted at: a whole new hemisphere of the mind becomes visible, completing the sphere. And in all his prose, though only in part of his verse, he has the qualities which he attributes to Pindar: “rejection of what is light and minute, disdain of what is trivial, and selection of those blocks from the quarry which will bear strong strokes of the hammer and retain all the marks of the chisel.” He wrote far more prose than verse, concentrating his maturest years upon the writing of prose. Was it, then, that his genius was essentially a prose genius, and that it was only when he turned to prose that, in the fullest sense, he found himself ? I do not think it can be said that the few finest things in Landor’s verse are excelled by the best of the many fine things in his prose; but the level is higher. His genius was essentially that of the poet, and it is to this quality that he owes the greater among the excellencies of his prose. In the expression of his genius he was ambidextrous, but neither in prose nor in verse was he able to create life in his own image. No one in prose or in verse has written more finely about things; but he writes about them, he does not write them.