Part 32

I shall have occasion to quote a few more verses when speaking of Mr. Landor's life. His Imaginary Conversations is the work on which his fame, a worthy and well earned fame, will rest. From his great experience of men of various nations, and his familiar acquaintance with both ancient and modern literature, he has been enabled to introduce the greatest variety of characters and topics, and to make the dialogues a perfect treasury of the broadest and most elevated axioms of practical wisdom. As I have observed, his station and personal interests have not been able to blind him to the claims of universal justice. He attacks all follies and all selfish conventionalisms with an unsparing scorn, which, in a poor man, would have been attributed to envy; but in his case, can not be otherwise regarded than as the honest convictions of a clear-seeing and just mind. In all his writings he insensibly slides into the dramatic form; even in his Pentameron, not less than in his Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare. His Pericles and Aspasia is in the form of letters, a form but one remove from conversation; in fact, conversation on paper. He must raise up the prominent characters of all ages, and, bringing the most antagonistic together, set them to argue some great or curious topic suited to their minds and pursuits. Through all these the author's own sentiments diffuse themselves, and become the soul of the book. Whoever converse, we are made to feel that virtue, generosity, self-sacrifice, and a warm sense of the wants and the true claims of the multitude, animate the soul of the author, and maintain a perpetual warfare against their opposite qualities, and the world's acquiescence in them. Mr. Landor, no doubt, like his fellows, does not despise the advantages which fortune has conferred on him; but he prides himself far more obviously on the power which resides in his pen. In his conversation with the Marchese Pallavicini, that nobleman relates the atrocious conduct of an English general at Albaro, and says, "Your Houses of Parliament, Mr. Landor, for their own honor, for the honor of the service, and the nation, should have animadverted on such an outrage; he should answer for it." To which Landor replies:--"These two fingers have more power, marchese, than those two houses. A pen! he shall live for it. What, with their animadversions, can they do like this?"

In his conversation between Southey and Porson, he puts into the mouth of Southey a sentence which all people would do well to ground firmly into their minds, and remember when they are reading reviews:--"We have about a million of critics in Great Britain; not a soul of which critics entertains the least doubt of his own infallibility. You, with all your learning, and all your canons of criticisms, will never make them waver." Into Porson's mouth he puts also a great fact, which, had he been a poor man, would have been hurled back on his head, and have crushed him to death. "Racy wine comes from the high vineyard. There is a spice of the scoundrel in most of our literary men; an itch to filch and detract in the midst of fair-speaking and festivity. This is the reason why I have never much associated with them. There is also another. We have nothing in common but the alphabet. The most popular of our critics have no heart for poetry: it is morbidly sensitive on one side, and utterly callous on the other. They dandle some little poet, and never will let you take him off their knees; him they feed to bursting, with their curds and whey. Another they warn off the premises, and will give him neither a crust nor a crumb, until they hear that he has succeeded to a large estate in popularity, with plenty of dependents; then they sue and supplicate to be admitted among the number; and, lastly, when they hear of his death, they put on mourning, and advertise to raise a monument or a club-room to his memory."

In the same conversation he has a striking illustration of the nature of metaphysics. "What a blessing are metaphysics to our generation! A poet or any other who can make nothing clear, can stir up enough sediment to render the bottom of a basin as invisible as the deepest gulf of the Atlantic. The shallowest pond, if turbid, has depth enough for a goose to hide its head in." He has a remark, not the less happy, on the folly of our reading ill-natured critiques on ourselves, and on the light in which those who inform you of them ought to be regarded. "The whole world might write against me, and leave me ignorant of it to the day of my death. A friend who announces to me such things, has performed the last act of his friendship. It is no more pardonable than to lift up the gnat net over my bed, on pretext of showing me there are gnats in the room. If I owed a man a grudge, I would get him to write against me; but if any one owed me one, he would come and tell me of it."

Here are two opinions worthy of the deepest reflection. "In our days, only men who have some unsoundness of conscience and some latent fear, reason against religion; and those only scoff at it, who are pushed back and hurt by it."--Vol. i. p. 372. "More are made insurgents by firing on them than by feeding them; and men are more dangerous in the field than in the kitchen."--P. 379. Mr. Landor's opinion of gambling, even ordinary, everyday play in private houses for money stakes, is expressed with a virtuous force which proves the depth of the feeling against it. "You played! Do you call it playing, to plunder your guests and overreach your friends? Do you call it playing, to be unhappy if you can not be a robber, happy if you can be one? The fingers of a gamester reach farther than a robber's, or a murderer's, and do more mischief. Against the robber or murderer, the country's up in arms at once; to the gamester every bosom is open, that he may contaminate or stab it."-Vol. ii. p. 76. Stern to faults which are tolerated, nay, are cherished by society, Savage Landor would be lenient where the wide-spreading misery and degradation of women in the present day calls loudly for a change in our social philosophy.

"_Marvel._--Men who have been unsparing of their wisdom, like ladies who have been unfrugal of their favors, are abandoned by those who owe most to them, and hated or slighted by the rest. I wish beauty in her lost estate had consolations like genius.

"_Parker._--Fie, fie! Mr. Marvel! consolations for frailty!

"_Marvel._--What wants them more? The reed is cut down, and seldom does the sickle wound the hand that cuts it. There it lies; trampled on, withered, and soon to be blown away."

Perhaps there is no one conversation in which so many popular fallacies and customs are so ruthlessly dealt with, as in that between the Emperor of China and his servant Tsing-Zi, who has been in England. His description of the Quakers is most characteristic. Tsing-Zi is astonished at the anti-Christian pugnacity of those calling themselves Christians. They make wars to make their children's fortune, and the preachers of the peaceful gospel are ready, if they disagree in a doctrine, to fight like a pair of cockerels across a staff on a market-man's shoulder. One scanty sect is different. "These never work in the fields or manufactories; but buy up corn when it is cheap, sell it again when it is dear, and are more thankful to God for a famine than others are for plenteousness. Painting and sculpture they condemn; they never dance, they never sing; music is as hateful to them as discord. They always look cool in hot weather, and warm in cold. Few of them are ugly, fewer handsome, none graceful. I do not remember to have seen a person of dark complexion, or hair quite black, or very curly, in their confraternity. None of them are singularly pale, none red, none of diminutive stature, none remarkably tall. They have no priests among them, and constantly refuse to make oblations to the priests royal."--Vol. ii. p. 119.

But there is, in fact, scarcely any great question of religion, morals, government, or the social condition, on which in these conversations the boldest opinions are not expressed in the most unshrinking style. Landor strips away all the finery in which follies, vices, and imposture are disguised for selfish ends, with a strong and unceremonious hand. He lifts up the veil of worldly policy, and showing us the hideous objects behind, says, "Behold your gods, O Israel!" His doctrines are such as would, less than ages ago, have consigned him to a pitiless persecution; they are such as, perhaps, in less than half another century, through the means of popular education, will be the common property of the common mind. The works of Savage Landor, both prose and poetry, place him among the very first men of his age. They are masterly, discriminating, and full of a genuine, English robustness. "They are energy and imagination that make the great poet," he has said in conversation. If he does not equal some of our poets in intensity of imagination, there are few of them who can compete with him in energy; and what is peculiarly fortunate, the instinct by which he cleaves to the real, and spurns the meretricious with contempt, makes him eminently safe for a teacher. You can find no glittering, plausible, destructive monstrosity, whether in the shape of man or notion, which Landor, like too many of our writers, has taken the perverse fancy to deify. His opinion of Bonaparte is a striking example of this. Hazlitt, acute and discriminating as he often was, placed this selfish and brutal butcher on a pedestal for adoration. Landor, in his conversation between "Landor, English visitor, and Florentine visitor," has given us an analysis of his character. He commences this with this remark. "Bonaparte seems to me the most extraordinary of mortals, because I am persuaded that so much power never was acquired by another, with so small an exertion of genius, and so little of any thing that captivates the affections; or maintained so long unbroken in a succession of enormous faults, such scandalous disgraces, such disastrous failures and defeats." He shows that he lost seven great armies in succession, which in every case of defeat he abandoned to destruction. If he has not said it in his works he has in conversation, that the true mark of a great man is, that he has accomplished great achievements with small means. Bonaparte never did this. He overwhelmed all obstacles by enormous masses of soldiery. He was as notorious for his recklessness of human life, for no possible end but his own notoriety, for his private cruelties and murders, as for his insolence and undignified anger; scolding those who offended him like a fishwoman, boxing their ears, kicking them, etc. Landor's words have always been my own--"It has always been wonderful to me, what sympathy any well educated Englishman can have with an ungenerous, ungentlemanly, unmanly Corsican."

Such is Walter Savage Landor as a writer, let us now look at him as a man. Landor's physical development is correspondent to that of his mind. He is a tall, large man; broadly and muscularly built, yet with an air of great activity about him. His ample chest, the erect bearing of his head, the fire and quick motion of his eye, all impress you with the feeling of a powerful, ardent, and decided man. The general character of his head is fine; massy, phrenologically amply developed, and set upon the bust with a bearing full of strength and character. His features are well formed and full of the same character. In his youth, Landor must have been pronounced handsome; in his present age, with gray hair and considerable baldness, he presents a fine, manly, and impressive presence. There is instantaneous evidence of the utter absence of disguise about him. You have no occasion to look deep, and ponder cautiously to discover his character. It is there written broadly on his front. All is open, frank, and self-determined. The lower part of his face displays much thought and firmness; there is a quick and hawk-like expression about the upper, which the somewhat retreating yet broad forehead increases. His eyebrows, arched singularly high on his forehead, diminish the apparent height of the head; but on looking at his profile, you soon perceive the great elevation of the skull above the line running from the ear to the eye. The structure, the air of the whole man, his action, voice, and mode of talking, all denote an extraordinary personage. His character is most unequivocally passionate, impulsive, yet intellectual and reflective; capable of excitement and of becoming impetuous, and perhaps headlong, for the fire and strength in him are of no common intensity. One can see that the quick instincts of his nature, that electric principle by which such natures leap to their conclusions, would render him excessively impatient of the slower processes or more sordid biases of more common minds. That he must be liable to great outbursts of indignation, and capable of becoming arbitrary and overbearing; yet you soon find, on conversing with him, that no man is so ready to be convinced of the right, or so free to rectify the errors of a hasty judgment. He has, in short, an essentially fine, high, vigorous nature; one which speaks forth in every page of his writings, and yet is so different to the stereotype of the world as to incur its dictum of eccentric.

Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick, on the 30th of January, 1775, consequently he is in his seventy-first year. The house in which he was born is near the chapel, and has a fine old spacious garden, well kept up by its present inhabitant, his only surviving sister. It is the best house in the town, and had a beautiful front before the improvement of the street required that four or five feet of the basement should be erased. Savage Landor's mother used to spend nearly half the year there, as his sister does now; for the garden has great charms, swarming with blackbirds, thrushes, and even wood-pigeons, which haunt several lofty elms and horse-chestnuts. His family had considerable estates both in Staffordshire and Warwickshire many centuries ago. His mother was eldest daughter and coheiress of Charles Savage, Esq., of Tachbrook, whose family were lords of that manor and of the neighboring manor of Whitmarsh, in the reign of Henry II. and much earlier. One of this family, according to Rapin, played a conspicuous part in demanding a charter from the weak king, Edward II., and in bringing his minion, Piers Gaveston, to his end. This was Sir Arnold Savage, whom Landor has commemorated by a conversation between him and Henry IV., and by a note at the end of it, viz.--"Sir Arnold Savage, according to Elsyne, was the first Speaker of the House of Commons who appeared _upon any record_, to have been appointed to the dignity as now constituted. He was elected a second time, four years afterward, a rare honor in earlier days; and during this presidency he headed the Commons, and delivered their resolutions in the plain words recorded by Hakewell." One of these was that the king should receive no subsidy till he had removed every cause of public grievance. Landor has come of good patriot blood. The Savages have also figured in Ireland; and Landor has introduced one of them, Philip Savage, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in Swift's time, in his Conversation with Archbishop Boulter, also connected by marriage with the Savage family. "Boulter," says Landor, "Primate of Ireland, and president of the council, saved that kingdom from pestilence and famine in the year 1279, by supplying the poor with bread, medicines, attendance, and every possible comfort and accommodation. Again, in 1740 and 1741, two hundred and fifty thousand were fed twice a-day, principally at his expense, as we find in _La Biographie Universelle_; an authority the least liable to suspicion. He built hospitals at Drogheda and Armagh, and endowed them richly. No private man, in any age or country, has contributed so largely to relieve the sufferings of his fellow-creatures; to which object he and his wife devoted their ample fortunes, both during their lives and after their decease. Boulter was certainly the most disinterested, the most humane, the most beneficent man that ever guided the councils of Ireland." Philip Savage, the chancellor, was so irreproachable, that even Swift, the reviler of Somers, could find in him no motive for satire and no room for discontent. Such was the ancestry of Walter Savage Landor.

Mr. Landor spent the first days of his youth at Ipsley-court, near Redditch, in Warwickshire, which manor belongs to him. You may trace his life and his residence by glimpses in his works; and of his old family mansion he speaks in his Conversation with the Marchese Pallavicini.

"_Pallavicini._--We Genoese are proud of our door-ways.

"_Landor._--They are magnificent; so are many in Rome, and some in Milan. We have none in London, and few in the country; where, however, the stair-cases are better. They are usually oak. I inherit an old, ruinous house, containing one, up which the tenant rode his horse to stable him."

In his poems, too, occurs this:--

WRITTEN IN WALES.

"Ipsley! when hurried by malignant fate I passed thy court, and heard thy closing gate, I sighed, but sighing to myself I said, Now for the quiet cot and mountain shade. Oh! what resistless madness made me roam From cheerful friends and hospitable home! Whether in Arrow's vale, or Tachbrook's grove, My lyre resounded liberty and love. Here never love hath fanned his purple flame, And fear and anger start at Freedom's name. Yet high exploits the churlish nation boasts Against the Norman and the Roman hosts. 'Tis false; where conquest had but reaped disgrace Contemptuous valor spurned the reptile race. Let me once more my native land regain, Bounding with steady pride and high disdain; Then will I pardon all the faults of fate, And hang fresh garlands, Ipsley, on thy gate."

Landor laughingly calls this old house a barracks. It is nearly a hundred feet in front, if not quite, but this portion formed only the offices of the old March-house, which the steward of the Savages, the clergyman, pulled down, and built his own with!

He received his education at Rugby, and at Trinity College, Oxford. At Rugby, as we are told by Mr. Horne in his New Spirit of the Age, he was famous for riding out of bounds, boxing, leaping, net-casting, stone-throwing, and making Greek and Latin verses. A droll anecdote is related of his throwing his casting-net suddenly over the head of a farmer who found him fishing in his ponds, and keeping him there till the fellow was tame enough to beg to be allowed to go away, instead of seizing Landor's net, as he had threatened. He was conspicuous there for his resistance to every species of tyranny, either of the masters and their rules, or the boys and their system of making fags, which he violently opposed against all odds; and he was considered arrogant and overbearing in his own conduct. All this, I have no doubt, is quite correct--it is most characteristic of the man and his writings; as well as that he was a leader of the boys in all things, and yet did not associate with them. This trait sticks by him to the present hour. He declares that he never can bear to walk with men; with ladies he can, but not with men, and that to walk in the streets of London drives him mad. To this peculiarity he alludes in the opening of the conversation between Southey and Landor; where also Southey mentions another, which no one can be long in Landor's society without noticing--his hearty peals of laughter at some merry story or other, often of his own.

"_Landor._--The last time I ever walked hither in company (which, unless with ladies, I rarely have done anywhere), was with a just, a valiant, and a memorable man, Admiral Nichols.

"_Southey._--I never had the same dislike to company in my walks and rambles as you profess to have, but of which I perceived no sign whatever when I visited you, first at Lantony Abbey, and afterward on the Lake Como. Well do I remember four long conversations in the silent and solitary church of Sant' Abondio (surely the coolest spot in Italy), and how often I turned back my head toward the open door, fearing lest some pious passer-by, or some more distant one in the wood above, pursuing the pathway which leads toward the tower of Luitprand, should hear the roof echo with your laughter, at the stories you had collected about the brotherhood and sisterhood of the place."

At Oxford, Mr. Horne informs us, Landor was rusticated for firing off a gun in the quadrangle, and, as he never intended to take a degree, he never returned. On quitting the university, he published, in 1793, a small volume of poems. After spending some time in London studying Italian, he went to reside at Swansea, where he wrote "Gebir."

Having been pressed in vain by his friends to enter the army, or to study the law, he was moved by his old spirit of resistance to oppression, by the French invasion of Spain. He embarked for that country, raised a number of troops at his own expense, and--being the first Englishman who landed in Spain for the purpose of aiding it--marched with his men from Corunna to Aguila, the head-quarters of General Blake. For this, he received the thanks of the supreme junta, in the Madrid Gazette, together with an acknowledgment of the donation of twenty thousand reals from Mr. Landor. On the subversion of the constitution by Ferdinand, he returned the letters and documents, with his commission, to Don Pedro Cevallos, telling Don Pedro that he was willing to aid a people in the assertion of its liberties against the antagonist of Europe, but he could have nothing to do with a perjurer and traitor.

I suppose it was before he left Spain that a circumstance occurred which led to his being robbed by George III., of which he often talks. Expressing to a Spanish nobleman a desire to have a ram and a couple of ewes of his celebrated Merino breed, the nobleman replied, "Oh, I will give you a score." Mr. Landor thanked him, but replied, that he did not wish to tax his generosity to that extent. "Oh," said he, "I kill them for mutton; you shall have a score. The King of England is to have a cargo of them, and I will send yours in the same ship." The ship arrived; a letter from the Spanish nobleman also arrived to say, that, according to promise, there they were, and that on applying to the king's steward, he would have them. Away went Landor to the steward, showed his letter, and demanded his sheep. The steward said he had no commands on the subject. "But his majesty," suggested Landor, "has undoubtedly information of the fact." "That," replied the steward, "is in his own breast." "But on seeing this letter," continued Landor, "his majesty will certainly give commands for the sheep to be delivered to me. Be so good as to see that it is laid before his majesty." The steward declined, declaring that it would be at the risk of his place.