These set criticisms, however, are few, and Landor was evidently not at ease in them. The literary “Conversations,” it may be said, are the true test. And it is at least certain that these conversations supply not a few of those more excellent critical observations which have been acknowledged and saluted. Especially must we acknowledge and salute one[[533]] which, though of considerable length, must be made an exception to the rule of “not quoting.” Nowhere, in ancient or modern place, is the education of the critic outlined with greater firmness and accuracy; and those who, by this or that good fortune, have been put through some such a process, may congratulate themselves on having learnt no vulgar art in no vulgar way.
Loculus aureolus.
l would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics, young and old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study such as this; that, under the superintendence of some respectable student from the University, they first read and examine the contents of the book—a thing greatly more useful in criticism than is generally thought; secondly, that they carefully write them down, number them, and range them under their several heads; thirdly, that they mark every beautiful, every faulty, every ambiguous, every uncommon expression. Which being completed, that they inquire what author, ancient or modern, has treated the same subject; that they compare them, first in smaller, afterwards in larger portions, noting every defect in precision and its causes, every excellence and its nature; that they graduate these, fixing plus and minus, and designating them more accurately and discriminately by means of colours stronger or paler. For instance purple might express grandeur and majesty of thought; scarlet, vigour of expression; pink, liveliness; green, elegant and equable composition; these, however, and others as might best attract their notice and serve their memory. The same process may be used where authors have not written on the same subject, when those who have are wanting or have touched on it but incidentally. Thus Addison and Fontenelle, not very like, may be compared in the graces of style, in the number and degree of just thoughts and lively fancies; thus the dialogues of Cicero with those of Plato, his ethics with those of Aristotle, his orations with those of Demosthenes. It matters not if one be found superior to the other in this thing and inferior in that: the qualities of two authors are explored and understood and their distances laid down, as geographers speak, from accurate survey. The plus and minus of good and bad and ordinary will have something of a scale to rest upon: and after a time the degrees of the higher parts in intellectual dynamics may be more nearly attained, though never quite exactly.
But again disappointing.
Yet in close context with this very passage comes an idle “splurt” (evidently half-due to odium anti-theologicum) at Coleridge—a thing exactly of the kind which such discipline as has been just recommended should check. And everywhere, especially in the long Miltonic examen between “Southey and Landor,” the effects of Landor’s character appear side by side with a sort of peddling and niggling censorship which one might have thought not natural to that character at all, and which perhaps is a damnosa hereditas from the worse kind of classical scholarship. Even on Boileau[[534]] he manages to be unfair; and at his objection to one of Milton’s most exquisite and characteristic lines—
“Lancelot and Pelleas and Pellinore”—
one can but cover the face. Caprice, arbitrary legislation, sometimes positive blindness and deafness,—these are Landor’s critical marks when he quits pure theory, and sometimes when he does not quit it.