His lack of judicial quality.
Landor’s[[532]] critical shortcomings, however, are the obvious and practically inevitable result of certain well-known peculiarities of temperament, moral rather than intellectual, and principles of life rather than of literature. With him, as with King Lear (whom in more ways and points than one he resembled, though, luckily, with the tragedy infinitely softened and almost smoothed away), the dominant is impotentia—the increasing and at last absolute incapacity of the intellect and will to govern the emotions and impulses. Now, as criticism is itself an endless process of correcting impressions—or at least of checking and auditing them till we are sure that they are genuine, co-ordinated, and (with the real if not the apparent consistency) consistent—a man who suffers from this impotentia simply cannot be a real critic, though he may occasionally make observations critically sound.
In regular Criticism.
The rule and the exceptions hold good with Landor unfailingly. He was an excellent scholar; his acquaintance with modern literatures, though much smaller and extremely arbitrary, was not positively small, and his taste, in some directions at least, was delicate and exquisite. But of judicial quality or qualities he had not one single trace, and, even putting them out of the question, his intelligence was streaked and flawed by strange veins of positive silliness. We need not dwell too much on his orthographical and other whims, which have been shared by some great ones—the judgments are the things. In the very first paragraph of his very first regular criticism we find the statement that the Poems of Bion and Moschus are not only “very different” from those of Theocritus but “very inferior.” Inferior in what? in bulk certainly: but in what else are the Adonis and the Bion itself inferior to anything Theocritean? A critic should have been warned by his own “different” not to rush on the “inferior,” which is so often fallaciously consequent. I shall not be accused of excessive Virgil-worship, but what criticism is there in the objection to me ceperat annus as “scarcely Latin” (really! really! Mr Landor, you were not quite a Pollio!), and in the flat emendation of mihi coeperat; or in the contemptuous treatment of that exquisite piece containing
ὁ θὴρ δ' ἔβαινε δειλῶς,
φοβεῖτο γὰρ Κυθήρην,
a phrase which, for simplicity, pictorial effect, and suggestion, is almost worthy of Sappho? Such a sentence as that of Politian’s poems, “one only has any merit,” is simply disabling: mere schoolboy prejudice has evidently blinded the speaker. Yet it occurs in his best critique, that on Catullus.
The Conversations.