Landor’s Domesticities.
Meanwhile, we have a sorry story to tell of Landor’s home belongings. There is a storm brewing in that beautiful villa of Fiesole. Children have been born to the house, and he pets them, fondles them—seems to love them absorbingly. Little notelets which pass when they are away, at Naples, at Rome, are full of pleasantest paternal banter and yearning. But those children have run wild and are as vagrant as the winds.
The home compass has no fixed bearings and points all awry—the mother, never having sympathy with the work which had tasked Landor in those latter years, has, too, her own outside vanities and a persistent petulance, which breaks out into rasping speech when Jupiter flings his thunder-bolts. So Landor, in a strong rage of determination, breaks away: turns his back on wife and children—providing for them, however, generously—and goes to live again at Bath, in England.
For twenty-three years he stays there, away from his family (remembering, perhaps, in self-exculpating way, how Shakespeare had once done much the same), rambling over his old haunts, writing new verse, revamping old books, petting his Pomeranian dog, entertaining admiring guests, fuming and raving when crossed. He was more dangerously loud, too, than of old; and at last is driven away, to escape punishment for some scathing libels into which a storm of what he counted righteous rage has betrayed him. It must have been a pitiful thing to see this old, white-haired man—past eighty now—homeless, as good as childless, skulking, as it were, in London, just before sailing for the Continent,—appearing suddenly at Forster’s house, seated upon his bed there, with Dickens in presence, mumbling about Latin poetry and its flavors!
He finds his way to Genoa, then to Florence, then to the Fiesole Villa once more; but it would seem as if there were no glad greetings on either side; and in a few days estrangement comes again, and he returns to Florence. Twice or thrice more those visits to Fiesole are repeated, in the vague hope, it would seem, floating in the old man’s mind, that by some miracle of heaven, aspects would change there—or perhaps in him—and black grow white, and gloom sail away under some new blessed gale from Araby. But it does never come; nor ever the muddied waters of that home upon the Florentine hills flow pure and bright again.