LANDOR’S IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS
Vol. xl.] [March 1824.
This work is as remarkable an instance as we have lately met with of the strength and weakness of the human intellect. It displays considerable originality, learning, acuteness, terseness of style, and force of invective—but it is spoiled and rendered abortive throughout by an utter want of temper, of self-knowledge, and decorum. Mr. Landor’s mind is far from barren in feeling or in resources; but over the natural, and (what might be) the useful growth of these, there every where springs up a luxuriant crop of caprice, dogmatism, extravagance, intolerance, quaintness, and most ludicrous arrogance,—like the red and blue flowers in corn, that, however they may dazzle the passenger’s eye, choke up the harvest, and mock the hopes of the husbandman. We are not ignorant of the school to which our author belongs; and could name other writers who, in the course of a laborious life, and in productions numerous and multiform—some recent and suited to the times, some long and luckily forgotten,—in odes, inscriptions, madrigals, epics,—in essays, histories and reviews,—have run into as many absurdities, and as many extremes: But never did we see, bound up in the same volume, close-packed, and pointed with all the significance of style, the same number of contradictions, staring one another in the face, and quarrelling for the precedence. Mr. Landor’s book is a perfect ‘institute and digest’ of inconsistency: it is made up of mere antipathies in nature and in reasoning. It is a chef-d’œuvre of self-opinion and self-will, strangling whatever is otherwise sound and excellent in principle, defacing whatever is beautiful in style and matter.
If it be true (as has been said) that
‘Great wits to madness nearly are allied,’
we know few writers that have higher or more unequivocal pretensions in this way than the author of the ‘Imaginary Conversations.’ Would it be believed, that, trampling manfully on all history and tradition, he speaks of Tiberius as a man of sentiment, who retired to Capri merely to indulge a tender melancholy on the death of a beloved wife: and will have it that Nero was a most humane, amiable, and deservedly popular character—not arguing the points as doubtful or susceptible of question, but assuming them, en passant, as most absolute and peremptory conclusions—as if whatever was contrary to common sense and common feeling carried conviction on the face of it? In the same page he assures us, with the same oracular tranquillity, that the conflagration of Rome, and the great fire of London, were both wise and voluntary measures, arising from the necessity of purifying the cities after sickness, and leaving no narrow streets in their centres! and on turning the leaf, it is revealed to us, that ‘there is nothing in Rome, or in the world, equal to—the circus in Bath!’ He spells the words foreign and sovereign, ‘foren’ and ‘sovran,’ and would go to the stake, or send others there, to prove the genuineness of these orthographies, which he adopts on the authority of Milton; and yet he abuses Buonaparte for being the ape of Antiquity, and talking about Miltiades. He cries up Mr. Locke as ‘the most elegant of English prose writers,’ for no other reason (as we apprehend) than that he has often been considered as the least so; and compares Dr. Johnson’s style to ‘that article of dress which the French have lately made peace with’ (a pair of pantaloons), ‘divided into two parts, equal in length, breadth, and substance, with a protuberance before and behind.’ He pronounces sentence upon the lost works of two ancient writers, Democritus and Menander, that the former would be worth all the philosophical remains of antiquity, and the latter not be worth having,—precisely because he can know nothing about the matter; the will to decide superseding the necessity of any positive ground of opinion, and the spirit of contradiction standing him in lieu of all other conviction. Boileau, according to our critic, had not a particle of sense, wit, or taste: Pope, to be sure, was of a different opinion—and we take it to be just possible that Boileau would have thought himself indemnified by the homage of the one for the scorn of the other! He speaks of Pitt as a poor creature, who did not see an inch before him, and of Fox as a charlatan; and says modestly in reference to some history he is writing, that he trusts ‘Posterity will not confound him with the Coxes and the Foxes of the age.’ It would be rather too much in his own manner perhaps to say, that no one who could write this sentence, will ever write a history—but we hazard the conjecture notwithstanding—and leave it to time to decide. He announces that Alfieri was the greatest man in Europe, though his greatness has not yet been generally acknowledged. This, however, is exactly the reason that Mr. Landor vouches for it, because whether he was so or not, rests solely on his ipse dixit. It is a fine thing to be one of the oracles of Fame! With equal modesty and candour he declares literary men to be as much superior to lords and kings as these last are to the meanest of their vassals. In a dialogue between Prince Maurocordato and General Colocotroni, he wishes the Greeks to substitute the bow for the use of fire-arms; and to this experimental crotchet, we suspect, he would sacrifice the Greek cause,—or any other. He has a hit at Lord Byron, and another at Mr. Thomas Moore, and a compliment to Lady Morgan. It is hard to say which he hates most—the English Government or the French people—Buonaparte or the Bourbons. He considers Buonaparte as a miracle, only because no man with so little talent ever gained such an ascendancy; and certainly with the qualifications our author allows him, he must have dealt with the Devil to do what he did; and, as if determined to conciliate no party and have all the world against him, he takes care to inform the reader at the same time, that in the most remarkable English victory in the last fifty years, ‘the prudence and skill of the commander (Wellington) were altogether wanting.’ He brings it as a proof of Buonaparte’s stupidity, that ‘he knew nothing of judicial astrology, which hath certain laws assigned to it, and fancied he could unite it with atheism, as easily as the iron crown with the lilies.’ He tells us, that ‘he did his utmost in pursuing this tyrant to death, recommending and insisting on nothing less:’ but that now he is dead, ‘he is sorry for it.’ So hot, indeed, is he on this scent, that he is for bringing Louis XIV. to life, in order to have him ‘carted to condign punishment in the Place de Grêve, or at Tyburn.’ We cannot understand this coincidence in the proposed fate of two persons so different; nor how Mr. Landor should call ‘the battle of Waterloo the most glorious to the victors since that of Leuctra,’ while he recommends a resort to tyrannicide, and points out its objects, to get rid of the legitimate consequences of that battle; nor why he should strike ‘his marble table with his palm,’ or call his country names—‘degenerate Albion,’—‘recreant slave,’ &c. &c. for not aiding ‘in the cause of freedom in Greece,’ when she has his thanks and praise for putting down the principle, at one blow, all over the world! Kings and nations, however, do not change like whiffling politicians. The one are governed by their prejudices, the other by their interests;—Mr. Landor and his friends by the opinion of the moment, by a fit of the spleen, by the first object that stirs their vanity or their resentment.
The work before us is an edifying example of the spirit of Literary Jacobinism,—flying at all game, running a-muck at all opinions, and at continual cross-purposes with its own. To avoid misconstruction, however, we should add, that we mean by this term, that despotism of the mind, which only emancipates itself from authority and prejudice, to grow impatient of every thing like an appearance of opposition, and to domineer over and dictate its sudden, crude, violent, and varying opinions, to the rest of the world. This spirit admits neither of equal nor superior, follower nor precursor: ‘it travels in a road so narrow where but one goes abreast.’ It claims a monopoly of sense, wit, and wisdom. To agree with it is an impertinence: to differ from it a crime. It tramples on old prejudices: it is jealous of new pretensions. It seizes with avidity on all that is startling or obnoxious in opinions, and when they are countenanced by any one else, discards them as no longer fit for its use. Thus persons of this temper affect atheism by way of distinction; and if they can succeed in bringing it into fashion, become orthodox again, in order not to be with the vulgar. Their creed is at the mercy of every one who assents to, or who contradicts it. All their ambition, all their endeavour is, to seem wiser than the whole world besides. If they are forced to adopt a common-place, they exaggerate it into a paradox, by their manner of stating it. So, in the ‘Imaginary Conversations,’ we learn, that ‘for every honest Italian, there are,’ not ten, or a hundred, but ‘a hundred thousand honest Englishmen.’ They hate whatever falls short of, whatever goes beyond, their favourite theories. In the one case they hurry on before to get the start of you; in the other, they suddenly turn back, to hinder you, and defeat themselves. It is not the love of truth, or of mankind, that urges them on—but the love of distinction; and they run into every extreme, and every folly, in order to indulge their overweening self-complacency and affected singularity.
An inordinate, restless, incorrigible self-love, is the key to all their actions and opinions, extravagancies, and meannesses, servility and arrogance. Whatever sooths and pampers this they applaud; whatever wounds or interferes with it they utterly and vindictively abhor. If an author is read and admired, they decry him; and if he is obscure or forgotten, or unintelligible, they extol him to the skies. But if they should succeed in bringing him into notice, and fixing him in the firmament of fame, they soon find out that there are spots in the sun, and draw the cloud of envy over his merits. A general is with them a hero, if he is unsuccessful or a traitor; if he is a conqueror in the cause of liberty, or a martyr to it, he is a poltroon. Whatever is doubtful, remote, visionary in philosophy, or wild and dangerous in politics, they fasten upon eagerly, ‘recommending and insisting on nothing less;’—reduce the one to demonstration, the other to practice, and they turn their backs upon their own most darling schemes, and leave them in the lurch immediately. With them everything is in posse, nothing in esse. The reason is, that they would have others take all their opinions implicitly from their infallibility: if a thing has grounds or evidence of its own to rest upon, so that they are no longer called in like prophets, to vouch for its truth, this is a sufficient excuse for them to discard it, and to look out for new terræ incognitæ to exercise their quackery and second-sight upon. So they cry up a protegé of their own, that nobody has ever heard of, as a prodigious genius, while he does nothing to justify the character they give of him, and exists only through the breath of their nostrils;—let him come forward in his own person, encouraged by their applause, and convince the world that he has something in him, and they immediately set to work to prove that he has borrowed all his ideas from them,—and is besides a person of bad moral character! They are of the church-militant; they pull down, but they will not build up, nor let any one else do it. They devote themselves to a cause, to a principle while it is in doubt or struggling for existence;—let it succeed, and they become jealous of it, and revile and hate the man by whom it has risen, or by whom it stands, like a triumphal arch over the ruins of barbaric thrones! For any one to do more for a cause than they have done, to be more talked of than they are, is a piece of presumption not hastily to be forgiven.
We consider the spirit which we have here attempted to analyze, as maintained in a state of higher concentration in this work than in any other we have for some time seen. Some of Mr. Southey’s lucubrations contain pretty good samples of it; but in him it is ‘dashed and brewed’ with other elements. He has been to court, is one of a firm, and mixes something of the cant of methodism with his effusions. But Mr. Landor keeps a private still of his own, where the unrectified spirit remains in its original vigour and purity,—cold indeed, and without the frothy effervescence of its first running, but unabated in activity, strength and virulence. We have pointed out what we regard as the ‘damning sin’ of this work; and having thus entered our protest, and guarded the reader against its mischievous tendency, we hold ourselves at liberty to extract what amusement or instruction we can from it. We are far from wishing to represent our author as ‘to every good word and work reprobate.’ On the contrary, we think he is naturally prone to what is right, but diverted from it by the infirmity we speak of. He has often much strength of thought, and vigour and variety of style; and we should be mortified, indeed, and deserving of mortification, if the petty provocation he has attempted to give us, could deter us from doing him that justice. He is excellent, whenever excellence is compatible with singularity. It is the fault of the school to which he belongs, not that they are blind to truth, or indifferent to good—but truth to be welcome must be a rare discovery of their own; they only woo her as a youthful bride; and are too soon satiated with the possession of what they desire, out of fickleness, or as the gloss of novelty wears off—or sue out a divorce from jealousy, and a dread of rivals in the favour of their former mistress!
This was the reason, whatever might be the pretext, why the same set of persons raised such an outcry against Buonaparte, and alone insisted on his assassination. They had no great objection to what he was doing—but they could not bear to think that he had done more than they had ever dreamt of. While they were building castles in the air, he gave law to Europe. He carved out with the sword, what they had only traced with the pen. ‘Never,’ says Mr. Landor, ‘had been such good laws so well administered over a considerable portion of Europe. The services he rendered to society were great, manifold, and extensive.’ But these services were hateful in their eyes—because he aggrandized himself in performing them. The power he wielded, the situation he occupied, excited their envy, much more than the stand he made against the common enemy, their gratitude. They were ready enough at all times to pull down kings, but they hated him worse who trampled, by his own might, on their necks—as more rivals to themselves, as running in the same race, and going farther in it. Any service, in short, any triumph is odious in their eyes, be it over whom, or in favour of what it will. Their great idol now is Washington; but this is because he acted upon comparatively a narrow theatre, and belongs to a people whose greatness is rather prospective than present; and also, because there is something in his mechanical habits and cold formality that appeases their irritable spleen.