Mr Landor, by the way, will be much amused to find himself praised—for what will our readers think?—for modesty! "I prefer," says Miss Mitford, "to select from the Hellenics, that charming volume, because very few have given such present life to classical subjects. I begin with the preface, so full of grace and modesty."
In the lady's mind, grace and modesty are no doubt inseparable companions; and, finding abundance of the one in Mr Landor's style, she concluded that the other must be there also. Of that other there is not an atom in all his writings, and there never was intended to be. It is a maidenly quality which he never had the remotest design of laying claim to. The very preface which she quotes is a piece of undisguised sarcasm. We doubt if there is much grace in it, certainly there is no modesty. Here is the commencement of this modest preface. "It is hardly to be expected that ladies and gentlemen will leave on a sudden their daily promenade, skirted by Turks, and shepherds, and knights, and plumes, and palfreys of the finest Tunbridge manufacture, to look at these rude frescoes, delineated on an old wall, high up, and sadly weak in colouring. As in duty bound, we can wait."
If Miss Mitford should ever read this preface again, she will pass her hand over her brow, a little puzzled where it was she saw the "modesty." She will appeal to Fanchon, who will be sitting in her lap, looking very intently over the page, and ask him what he thinks of the matter. Fanchon will laugh out obstreperously, will bark delighted, at the amiable blunder of his mistress.
We remarked that we had been occasionally struck with an omission, or a silence. It seems to us a characteristic circumstance that we hear no mention made of Lord Byron. Wordsworth and Southey, Coleridge and Shelley, get some space allotted to them, larger or smaller; but he who occupied so conspicuous a position among these very contemporaries has none whatever. It is not because he still holds a very high rank amongst our poets—though by no means the same eminence that was once assigned to him—that we notice this omission; but because his writings had so strong and peculiar an influence on most minds open to the influence of poetry, that we naturally expect to meet with his name in the literary recollections of one who, we way venture to say without any ungallant reference to chronology, must have lived in that period when Lord Byron was in the ascendant. There are few persons who, in acknowledging the happy influence of Wordsworth's poetry, would not have to commence their confession by some account of the very opposite influence of Lord Byron's. We should have said that the Byronic fever was a malady which hardly any of our contemporaries, who are liable to catch a fever of any kind from books, had entirely escaped. Miss Mitford, however, hints at no such calamity. Her excellent constitution seems to have preserved her from it. She bore a charm against all such plagues, in her clear sense and cheerful temper. She was thereby preserved from some very absurd misery—very absurd, but most indisputable misery; and she also lost some experience of a not unprofitable nature—certain lessons of wisdom which, being burnt into one, are never afterwards to be obliterated from the mind.
If the subject were but one shade more attractive, or less repulsive than it is, we would, for the benefit of such exempted persons as Miss Mitford, describe the course and the symptoms of this Byronic fever. We would describe how, some luckless day, the youth who ought to be busy with his Greek or his Euclid plays truant over the poetry of Childe Harold and Manfred; how it makes him brimful of unaccountable misery; how, as is most natural, he reads on the faster—reads on insatiate and insensate.
But what tossings and throbbings and anguish the patient endures we have no wish to depict. The one thing worth noticing is this, that although the sufferer is perfectly convinced that the whole world is, or ought to be, as wretched as himself, he has not, in all his compositions, one jot of compassion left—not one jot for any species of misery, not even that which resembles and re-echoes his own. Some calamities are said to teach us sympathy with the calamities of others—so sings Virgil, we remember—but this misery has the property of hardening the heart against any human sympathy whatever. One of these imaginary misanthropes cannot even tolerate the lamentations of another. You may listen to his outcries and denunciations if you will, but if, in your turn, you wish to bellow ever so little, you must go into the next field—go many fields off. Very curious is the hardness of heart bred out of a morbid passion of meditative discontent. Why does he live? why does he continue his miserable existence? is the only reflection which the sufferings of another man excite in our moody philosopher. For every lamenting wretch he has daggers, bowels of poison—no pity. If mankind could commit one simultaneous, universal act of suicide, it would be a most sublime deed—perhaps the only real act of wisdom and sublimity mankind has it in its power to perform.
Well, this absurd and horrible, this very ridiculous and most afflictive of morbid conditions, our clear-minded authoress never seems to have passed through. She never gave the beggar a shilling, muttering some advice to buy a rope withal. If the money were spent in that way, and more were wanted, he should have two. She never lent her friend a brace of pistols by way of consolation for his losses. Or, since ladies, even when misanthropically disposed, have seldom anything to do with pistols, she never wove or platted for him a silken bowstring, and sent it in a perfumed envelope, with compliments and instructions how to use it. All this chapter of mental history has been a sealed book to her. We, for our parts, have no desire to open or to read further in it.
The happiest step made by those whose temper and mode of thinking were likely to be formed by practical literature, was when they deserted Byron for Wordsworth, the Childe Harold for the Excursion. If we were to indulge in "Recollections" of our own, we should have much to say—and to say with pleasure—of this second epoch, this Wordsworthian era. A very beautiful Flora appeared upon the earth during this period. Life smiled again; nature and humanity were no longer divorced; one might love the solitude and beauty of hill and valley, lake and river, without hating man, or breathing any other sentiment than that of gratitude to Him who gave this life, who gave this nature.
Wordsworth was peculiarly fitted to be the successor of Byron. He had himself shared in the dark and desponding spirit of the age just so much as enabled him to understand and portray it, to assail or to alleviate. He had scanned the abyss looking down from the precipice, but his feet were well planted on the jutting rock. He threw his vision down; he stood firm himself. He drew many an inspiration from the dark gulf below; but nothing betrays that he had ever plunged into the abyss. His poetry will at all times have a genial influence, but it can never again exert the same power, or, as a consequence, excite the same enthusiastic plaudits, which it did amongst the generation who have now advanced to manhood. It then fell upon the ear of the tired pupil of doubt and discontent. It had a healing power; it was sweet music, and it was more—it was a charm that allayed a troubled spirit.