Walter Savage Landor.
Contemporary with all of these great poets, and with Tennyson and Browning, and the youth of William Morris, the two Rossettis and Swinburne, was Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), who thus, like Nestor, reigned through three generations. He was coeval with, but was not influenced by "the romantic movement," but followed his own path. He was a very copious writer both in prose and verse; he did not aim at and did not win popularity.
Landor is said to have prophesied that he would "dine late," but in good company,—that recognition when it came to him, would come from the best judges. The essay on Landor, by Swinburne, places his plays, such as "Count Julian," and his poem in blank verse ("Gebir") on "topless towers," of panegyric. To smaller, other eyes, those of the ordinary reader, "Gebir" (1798) seems well described as "concentrated and majestic," just as Mr. Wopsle's Hamlet was "concrete and massive". But "Gebir" is not, as a narrative, interesting or plausible; its blank verse is rather frigid, as a rule, and the poem is best remembered for the two lines on the shell held to the ear.
And it remembers its august abode,
And murmurs as the Ocean murmurs there.
The blank verse is somewhat in the manner of Milton, with far less life and variety. The wrestling match between Gebir's brother, the piping shepherd, and the lovely lady unknown who lands from a boat and challenges the swain, indicated Landor's colossal lack of humour, which, to be sure, is no small part of a noble and haughty poetic nature. If the play, "Count Julian" be academic, if it have found even fewer admirers than "Gebir," Mr. Swinburne as an admirer was himself a host. The huge body of short verses, in which every reader will find many delightful things, is crowned by "Rose Aylmer," which would be a pearl of great price even in the treasure-house of the Greek Anthology. His lyric verse is always graceful, and occasionally moving.
Landor left Trinity College, Oxford, under the wrath of his dons. He had only fired a fowling piece out of his windows, at the shuttered windows of a room occupied by a noisy wine-party, and no harm was done. Many persons may remember similar excesses at Oxford which caused no expulsions, but Landor (the Boythorn of "Bleak House") was extremely explosive, and his dons, like Shelley's, took the first fair opportunity to send him down for a term. He "came to Oxford and his friends no more". In England his life was more or less turbulent and perturbed: most of his literary work was done in Italy, and the greater part of his abundant prose is written in the form of imaginary conversations. In one ("Southey and Landor") he says, "from my earliest days I have avoided society as much as I could decorously, for I received more pleasure in the cultivation and improvement of my own thoughts than in walking up and down among the thoughts of others". If Landor had remembered Lord Foppington's similar explanation of his own avoidance of books, and preference for "the sprouts of his own wit," Landor might have been less frank! In this conversation Landor and Southey compare Milton and Homer, and it is to be hoped that Southey had no sympathy with the purblind criticisms which are put into his lips. Landor ends "a rib of Shakespeare would have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since". It is certainly in his "Conversations," and in the long series of imaginary letters entitled "Pericles and Aspasia," that the late diners with Landor are most likely to find desirable things—lofty thoughts, impassioned language, and deep meditation. The conversations, naturally, differ in merit; that between Bothwell and Mary Stuart, after her abduction, is not in anything likely to have been their manner, and has no tragic touch (though no scene could be richer in the elements of tragedy), while in the talk of Jeanne d'Arc and Agnes Sorel two persons were brought together who were not likely to meet, especially at the moment when "many of our wisest and most authoritative churchmen," says Agnes, "believe you in their conscience to act under the instigation of Satan". When Agnes addresses the Maid as "sweet enthusiast," we are far away from the style of 1430! In the dialogues of even remote historic personages, more than half the mind of Landor is with his own day and its problems and politics; while he was perhaps the last Englishman who lived with the Roman genius so much that a good deal of his prose and verse is written in Latin. He even wrote a version of "Gebir" in the language of Virgil. He was the friend of, or was admired by, many of the best minds of his long stay on earth, Southey, De Quincey, Browning, and Swinburne. In two sentences Sir Sidney Colvin has put forward the character of much of Landor's work: "He drones. It is a classical, and from the point of view of style an exemplary form of droning, but it is droning still."
[1] By a strange coincidence the printed score of the match (the manuscript was burned in a fire at Lord's) docks Byron of half his runs, and apparently confers them on Mr. Shakespeare! Byron was a change-bowler.