Landor's Poetry

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IT is not easy to admit a great liking for Landor without ranging one’s self with the Landorians, however desirous one may be to avoid the special pleading of a sectarian for the god of his fancy. And indeed our natural sympathy for the under-god may readily put us in the way of conversion to the right Landorian sect, or to any other.We begin by sticking up for somebody, and end by falling fairly under his spell, or under the spell which our assiduity has woven about him. We are aware that no greatness needs sticking up for, that in the end it must get what it deserves. But in the meantime we may say what we can in the interest of our friends ; for Landor, certainly, the end is not yet. The existence of his poetry is suspected by many persons who have a nodding acquaintance with the gilt backs of his Imaginary Conversations : in some such way the case still stands against the reading public, even perhaps against the minor part of it which may not more properly be called the buying and borrowing public. In prose he has at least won the success of esteem, — the sort of success which is often in itself enough to keep one from being really read much. An invisible but real barrier rises like an exhalation between the common human being and the possessor of that mysterious quality, “ style.” If we could only forget that Burke and Landor and De Quincey had style, we might find them more humanly approachable ; as it is, let us make our salaams and pass on. Landor’s prose is read by many, if not by the many, and is greatly deferred to.

It would hardly be true to say as much of his verse, which, though it comes highly recommended, appeals to a surprisingly small audience. This is easy to account for on superficial grounds alone. Its serenity of tone, its purity of outline, its lack of ornateness in detail, are precisely the qualities with which modern poetry is inclined to dispense. Pentelic marble is good, but we of to-day prefer, secretly or otherwise, the glowing if perishable canvases of our Titians, or even of our Bouguereaus. These at least are full of warmth and feeling ; we may do very well without the severity of form which seemed paramount to an earlier and, after all, a ruder age. Purity of form is certainly the most salient characteristic of Landor’s verse; no modern writer has possessed it in the same measure. Milton was pure, but, if we except the sonnets, rarely in English ; his wonders were done in a hybrid medium. Wordsworth was pure, but only in his finest moments, and never at any considerable remove from baldness. An austere purity is Landor’s native air ; and though it blew from Parnassus, he breathed it on the banks of Avon.

But Milton and Wordsworth possessed a quality his lack of which accounts less obviously for Landor’s failure to gain the larger public. They were dead in earnest, and their earnestness sprang from a profound sense of moral responsibility. “ The poet’s message to his time ” has become something of a catchphrase in criticism. The fact that a great poet has had a particular thesis to present to his own generation is historically interesting, but hardly accountable for his greatness. For it is not likely to be in the exercise of his highest gift as a poet that he has directly influenced the opinion or behavior of his neighbors in time or place. He has made practical use of an instrument the highest use of which is not immediate or practical. Yet there is no doubt that the habit of moral conviction and settledness of mind, which in its direct application is likely to produce poetry, if real, of an inferior order, must by indirection enrich even the sort of poetry that seems most spontaneous and unfortified with opinion. This would apply even to the work of the dramatic poet, who is supposed to have his being in a chronic process of self-effacement. As for the lyric poet, since it is his affair to express only himself, we inevitably feel the invisible moral atmosphere in which that self moves. To say that such a poet has no message should mean not that he fails to say things, but simply that the total impression of his personality inferred from his utterance is in some way inharmonious or incomplete. The inference from the lyrical verse of Milton or Wordsworth is an inference of suppressed moral zeal; the Muse has forced them for the moment to an expression of pure feeling, though they would have liked, perhaps, to be at their favorite business of preaching. Landor’s suppression, on the other hand, is of a weakness, or, more fairly perhaps, of a limitation. He cannot fitly utter the whole of his personality in verse, for his life, rich in the materials of poetry, was not a poem. A certain instability of moral temper is to be hidden, not dishonestly, but decently and in the name of art. Unfortunately for this poet, the more nearly man and artist are fused, the stronger a poet’s hold is upon general sympathy. We are not satisfied to be admitted to one corner of a man’s heart, or to a single chamber of his brain, even if we have reason to think the rest of the house is given over to cobwebs and skeleton closets. There is something disconcerting in the admirable manners of a person about whom things are rumored ; we do not know which way to look in his presence.

One of the most comfortable ways of disposing of Landor has been by the resort to paradox. What an unaccountable creature he was, — hot-headed and gentle, dreamy and disputatious, stubbornly proud and the sport of every whim, a sort of literary ruffian and an apostle of peace. " I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,” he writes with lofty serenity, after threescore and ten years of quarreling with everybody. What are we to make of such a person as that?

But nothing is easier to manage than a paradox if one takes the trouble to humor it. Admitted that Landor was a dare-devil student, an irascible husband, an ungovernable subject, and that he wrote much of the serenest prose, the most delicately urbane verse in the language ; and there is still nothing confused or irrelevant in the story of his life and work, nothing even to suggest him as a “ case ” for the Society for Psychical Research. His personality was by no means a patchwork of stray entities ; given the flesh and blood, everything else is congruous and germane. To so turbulent and exuberant a nature there could be only one literary salvation : the guiding instinct of the artist, to impose here and restrain there, so that of the multitude of impressions by which the poet is besieged, each may find its allotted place, — may be discarded as unworthy of expression, or given the expression which is fit. The irresponsible rude vigor which marked Landor’s daily conduct and habit of mind was somehow precipitated by the act of art, taking on a form of dignity and grace, as some cloudy chemical virtue assumes the lucid firmness of the crystal. Here, then, is the true Landorian paradox : precisely because he was all compact of ungovernable will and romantic feeling, his art must subject itself to classical line and precept; his fluid nature crystallizing, that it might not diffuse itself in ineffective vapor, and the poetic medium of expression become “ a limbeck only.”

Restless vigor of mind, rather than productive intellectual energy, would seem to mark much of his prose work. He bristled with opinions, and delighted to give them a sonorous utterance of which he only was capable. But we do not feel sure of the fundamental principles upon which he grounds them; we are troubled by a lurking doubt, not of his sincerity, but of his responsibility, and we come to take each of his good things with a pinch of reservation. In his lyrical mood, fortunately, this is of less consequence. We do not want him to reason, we want him to feel ; and if his confidences are kept within measure, we may be sure that he is observing a principle which not even romantic poetry can safely ignore. “ The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life,” says William Blake, in one of his remarkable prose fragments, “ is this — that the more distinct, wiry, and sharp the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art.” Landor’s life suffers from the application of this rule, but it is exactly the merit of his art. And it is the possession of this merit which distinguishes him from a popular poet like Byron. Byron had apparently much in common with him; he, too, was turbulent, difficult, irresponsible, a republican in theory and an aristocrat in taste, a rebel against society, and an exile from respectable England. Yet Byron’s verse expresses all that was in him, for good or ill. It is as romantic and unrestrained in form as in feeling, now lofty, now sensational, now sentimental, now cynical. Why could not Landor have written himself like that ?

The two poets met only once, at a perfumer’s, where Landor was buying attar of roses, and Byron, scented soap. There is a whimsical suggestion in the incident of the difference between them : the refined artist, with his power of concentrating and purifying emotion, at some cost of popularity, and the coarsish amateur, with his constant and successful appeal to “ the gallery ” by the exaggeration of what he believed himself to feel. A very little perfume will go a long way — in soap. Of course one cannot get rid of Byron in any such summary way ; but the real power in him was obscured by the very quality which made him popular ; so much at least is true. The fashionable improvisatore was understood to be beyond the common law ; his work is unconscious of the “ bounding line ” in thought or expression ; and it has not stood. Landor had Byron’s habit of producing his verse at a heat, and of giving it little or no revision, but a glance is enough to show how different the product of rapid workmanship is from the product of improvisation.

But, one perhaps thinks, Landor has so little human interest. What a picture of English society lies open in Byron’s verse. Here was a man who knew the age in which he lived, and consequently left his mark upon it. As a matter of fact, Landor, too, was absorbingly interested in the life about him, an eager radical, ready to see the world move forward, and to help it as far as he could. His youthful mind was deeply stirred, as all noble minds were, by the liberty and equality propaganda ; and not merely to opinion, as his personal enlistment in the Spanish cause presently showed. Nor was his interest in the problem of the hour less intense in later life. All this zest in practical matters finds outlet in his prose ; he had other uses for his verse, though none in the least remote from human interest. For the greatest human interests are beyond those which are born of emergency or fashion, and it is these interests above all others which the poet is bound to interpret for us. Some deep concerns of life left Landor unmoved, as we have seen. He has the unmorality of the healthy pagan. He lacks the subdued religious fervor which gives its tone, for better or worse, to the poetry of Christendom ; but he knew his own heart, and it was greater than most.

It was only in his art that he stood consciously aloof from his contemporaries, owing nothing, as he rightly boasted, to any man or school of them all. Nor was he the founder of a school, though even his earliest work contains a sure presage of the greatest Victorian poetry, and all later poets have been subtly in his debt. His influence exerted itself upon the method rather than upon the manner of their work. English verse gained from him a new sense of chastity and proportion, not as a desired quality, — imported direct from the Mediterranean or filtered through this or that Latin source, and in either case carrying with it much foreign baggage of diction and syntax, — but as a native virtue, obviously inseparable from the simplest and purest English idiom. Landor’s personal manner was incommunicable. Nobody has successfully imitated even his trifles ; it is harder to build a bubble to order than a palace.

It is almost a pity to have connected the word trifle with his shorter lyrics, for only what is imperfect is trifling in art, and in these poems Landor’s art has attained its pure perfection. The opinion is common that his real power lay in the direction of the drama: I think it mainly lyrical. His plays are not mere Æschylean elaborations in dialogue of lyrical motives; nor are they root-bound by the utter subjectivity of Byron. But they are barren of action, and of rapid dramatic speech. Above all, they lack the passionate interplay of circumstance and temperament, the infinitely varied illumination of character, which mark the creative drama. Landor does not create, he discerns. Human nature he knew in the large, because he knew himself. He knew, too, certain striking types of character, the scholar, the priest, the libertine, the king, the woman ; but he could not differentiate them, as examples of the same general type are given distinct personalities by Shakespeare or Miss Austen. His characters speak according to his opinion of what such characters would say rather than of their own accord, because they are what they are. The Imaginary Conversations are properly named ; only two or three of them have even the semblance of dramatic dialogue. Yet to make one’s characters speak according to one’s opinion of what they would say still leaves much leeway for excellence. If Landor lacks the power to create persons, to set the breath of life in motion and let flesh and blood take care of itself and its own, he possesses a faculty of only secondary value to the poet. He is able to divine the significance of types, and to give them humanity, if not personality. His persons are as much more concrete than Ben Jonson’s as they are less convincing than Shakespeare’s. In short, he carries the objective process as far as it will go ; that he came so near dramatic achievement is due to the fact that he was not merely intellectually, but sympathetically objective.

Very early in life he conceived an ambition to express himself in the more formal and sustained poetic modes, which resulted in those two superb efforts of his ’prentice hand, Gebir and Count Julian. One might be inclined to say of such work that it fulfills its own promise. In its merely technical aspect it was very remarkable; there had been no such blank verse written since Milton. But the public was deaf to that sounding music, and the poet, independent as he professed himself, rather than be ignored, gave up an effort in which mere hostility might have confirmed him. “ I confess to you,” he said quietly, many years after, “ if even foolish men had read Gebir, I should have continued to write poetry ; there is something of summer in the hum of insects.” But it is easily possible to exaggerate the world’s loss from his failure to develop a faculty for formal epic and dramatic composition. Baffled by the silence with which his first great bursts of song were met, the poet must still be in some manner expressing himself. Noble as are those majestic tours de force, we can hardly doubt that he found a more fitting utterance in the less pretentious lyrical forms in which his genius took refuge. If he can no longer dream of rearing massy shafts to the level of cloud-capped Ilium, or sounding the depths of passionate experience, there are still the delicate flowers of human sentiment, over which he may lean and smile a moment as he passes. He has not torn them from their root in his heart; let the world do with them what it will.

The world has done very little with them, as it did very little with that other poetry of his. Why should one halt in the sober journey of life to dwell upon a mere prettiness of four or a dozen lines like Dirce or Rose Aylmer ? What if it is perfect in its way, — so is the symbol for nothing. A half thought, a dainty sentiment tricked in graceful verse, — how is the conscientious student of literature to find a criticism of life in such poetry as this ? Now and then the question strikes home upon some honest Landorian, and a table of the master’s solid excellences is produced, to the confusion of his critics, and of the question in point. For the lover of Landor sometimes fails to see the superior value of his lighter work. He is praised for his dignity rather than for his grace, for his vigor of conception rather than for his delicate humanness of feeling. Yet grace and sympathy, not gravity and force, constitute the main charm of his verse.

As the poet of refined sentiment Landor stands quite alone in English ; that, it seems to me, is his distinction. It is not at all the popular sort of sentiment; its serenity and subtlety are doubtless irritating to the patron of literary vaudeville. You are not in the least danger of laughing one moment and crying the next; humor and sentiment are not set off against each other, they simply have no separate existence. It is an inner quality which quite as distinctly as his outward manner marks Landor’s kinship with the poets of the old world. Yet no poetry has been written which is more free from the taint of the lamp. He was a Greek in nothing more truly than in his daily dependence upon the spiritual elbow-room of field and sky. He was in the habit of composing out of doors. His atmosphere is always quietly in motion. Love of nature was a trait of his, not a virtue. He has nothing of the mystical worshiping attitude which Wordsworth and his disciples have imposed upon us almost as a duty. He breathed freer in the open, that was all. A wild flower was more to him than a mountain peak. The daily round may do very well without grandeur, but hardly without its objects of chivalry and affection. And upon human nature, accordingly, he looks with tenderness rather than with the passionate yearning of romantic poets. The world has its tragedies, but there are many pleasant things in it for a healthy man to take delight in.

The shorter lyrics of Landor, then, constitute a poetry of urbanity, a sort of sublimated vers de société. With all the elegance and good-breeding in the world, it is never artificial; the smirk of the courtier is never to be detected under the singer’s wreath. It is urbane, but least of all urban. It deals unostentatiously with the kindlier human sentiments: personal affection for places, employments, living things ; friendship without its exactions, hope without suspense, memory without bitterness ; love without its reactions and reverses. It belongs to the healthy life which is aware of conditions rather than problems. In certain buoyant and full-blooded moods, the mysteries of existence do not trouble one ; there is a straight road to everything. Doubt of one’s self or the world is a sort of treason, sorrow and suffering are morbid affections of the brain. Any extravagant feeling seems hysterical, even extravagant joy. The body is active, the mind ruminates, quietly conscious of every-day relations and experiences. This golden mood is habitual with Landor, and it is this mood to which he gives utterance in poetry not less rich because it is confined for the most part to the middle register.

The quality of his work in this vein is nowhere better illustrated than in his poetic treatment of a single cherished sentiment, the tenderness of a strong man for womanhood. For flowers and for women he had the same fondness, touched sometimes with humor, but never with hard analysis ; he was not a botanist nor an anatomist. In an early letter to Southey he owns a weakness for the study of feminine character, and it must have been very early that he gained the perception of a real type of womanhood to which he is never tired of paying tribute. It would be absurd to think of laying the finger upon this or that feminine creature of Shakespeare’s and saying, “ This is the woman of Shakespeare.” The woman of Landor, on the contrary, is as distinct a type as — to compare great things with small — the Du Maurier woman. She is, like most of Shakespeare’s heroines, in the first blossoming of youth and grace. Her delicate purity, her little petulances, her womanish lights and shadows of mood and mind, arouse in the poet an infinite delight. He has the reverence of a lover for her subtle charm, and a goodhumored cousinly indulgence for her foibles. The feeling of his Epicurus for Ternissa, or of his Æsop for Rhodope, leaves nothing to regret for those of us who think none the less of human life because it does not habitually wear the buskin. Brutus’s Portia or the mother of the Gracchi Landor may admire ; but his little Ianthe stands for the sex in his eyes. “ God forbid that I should ever be drowned in any of these butts of malmsey! ” he said of Oriental poetry. “ It is better to describe a girl getting a tumble over a skipping-rope made of a wreath of flowers.”

Here and there throughout the varied volume of his work this dainty creature is continually making her exits and her entrances. The nymph in Gebir embodies her human self : —

And in the Hellenics, written fifty years later, she again speaks through the halfdivine lips of the Hamadryad : —

But these are only hints of sweetness ; it is in Landor’s shorter lyrics that she chiefly lives. There is no pretty caprice or evanescent cloud of temper which he allows to escape the airy fetters of his verse. Now it is merely the sweet playfulness of girlhood : —

Now it is her buoyant good humor : —

Perhaps it is the momentary shifting of her moods: —

Or it is her sheer charm, to be wondered at, not phrased about: —

Sometimes, too, he touches a deeper string, though still without overstepping the bound between sentiment and passion : —

Ianthe in absence still gives color to his mood : —

Or, with a more characteristic lightness of touch, he is uttering one of the finest things ever said by man to absent maid :

She is real to him ; though delicately idealized, not conventionalized, as is often true of the darlings of the lighter muse.

Not less remarkable than this sureness of conception is the perfection of the medium employed ; its simple diction, its subtle variations of rhythm, giving even to the baldest of verse forms, the quatrain in ballad metre, a high distinction; its elusive power of suggestion ; the curious fillip to fancy and feeling often given in the final verse. One does not feel that there has been a process of adjustment between thought and expression; neither could exist without the other. Who can really conceive a mute inglorious Landor — or Milton ? But we may avoid a nearer approach to that Serbonian bog, the question of style. Landor’s light verse is society verse without the exclusions of caste, occasional verse without its mouthing and ornamentation ; a pure type of lyrical comedy. Such poetry has its serious uses. Delicacy of sentiment and austerity of form may well command attention from an over-intense, ornate period like ours. Surely we are not grown too serious to turn at times from the agony of Lear or the titanic petulance of Satan to a consideration of “ the tangles of Neæra’s hair ” ? It would be a pity if the habit of listening virtuously to any variety of poetic thunder, even stage thunder, should have unfitted us to enjoy — and not be ashamed — poetry of pure sentiment, poetry like this: —

H. W. Boynton.