IMAGINARY CONVERSATION, BETWEEN MR. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR AND THE EDITOR OF BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.
To Christopher North, Esq.
SIR,—Mr. Walter Savage Landor has become a contributor to Blackwood's Magazine! I stared at the announcement, and it will presently be seen why. There is nothing extraordinary in the apparition of another and another of this garrulous sexagenarian's "Imaginary Conversations." They come like shadows, so depart.
"The thing, we know, is neither new nor rare, But wonder how the devil it got there."
Many of your readers, ignorant or forgetful, may have asked, "Who is Mr. Landor? We have never heard of any remarkable person of that name, or bearing a similar one, except the two brothers Lander, the explorers of the Niger." Mr. Walter Savage would answer, "Not to know me argues yourself unknown." He was very angry with Lord Byron for designating him as a Mr. Landor. He thought it should have been the. You ought to have forewarned such readers that the Mr. Landor, now your Walter Savage, is the learned author of an epic poem called Gebir, composed originally in Egyptian hieroglyphics, then translated by him into Latin, and thence done into English blank verse by the same hand. It is a work of rare occurrence even in the English character, and is said to be deeply abstruse. Some extracts from it have been buried in, or have helped to bury, critical reviews. A copy of the Anglo-Gebir is, however, extant in the British Museum, and is said to have so puzzled the few philologists who have examined it, that they have declared none but a sphinx, and that an Egyptian one, could unriddle it. I would suggest that some Maga of the gypsies should be called in to interpret. Our vagrant fortune-tellers are reputed to be of Egyptian origin, and to hold converse among themselves in a very strange and curious oriental tongue called Gibberish, which word, no doubt, is a derivative from Gebir. Of the existence of the mysterious epic, the public were made aware many years ago by the first publication of Mr. Leigh Hunt's Feast of the Poets, where it was mentioned in a note as a thing containing one good passage about a shell, while in the text the author of Gebir was called a gander, and Mr. Southey rallied by Apollo for his simplicity in proposing that the company should drink the gabbler's health. That pleasantry has disappeared from Mr. Hunt's poem, though Mr. Landor has by no means left off gabbling. Mr. Hunt is a kindly-natured man as well as a wit, and no doubt perceived that he had been more prophetic than he intended—Mr. Landor having, in addition to verses uncounted unless on his own fingers, favoured the world with five thick octavo volumes of dialogues. From the four first I have culled a few specimens; the fifth I have not read. It is rumoured that a sixth is in the press, with a dedication in the issimo style, to Lord John Russell, Mr. Landor's lantern having at last enabled him to detect one honest man in the Imperial Parliament. Lord John, it seems, in the House of Commons lately quoted something from him about a Chinese mandarin's opinion of the English; and Mr. Landor is so delighted that he intends to take the Russells under his protection for ever, and not only them, but every thing within the range of their interests. Not a cast horse, attached to a Woburn sand-cart, shall henceforth crawl towards Bedford and Tavistock Squares, but the grateful Walter shall swear he is a Bucephalus. You, Mr. North, have placed the cart before the horse, in allowing Mr. Landor's dialogue between Porson and Southey precedence of the following between Mr. Landor and yourself.
You may object that it is a feigned colloquy, in which an unauthorized use is made of your name. True; but all Mr. Landor's colloquies are likewise feigned; and none is more fictitious than one that has appeared in your pages, wherein Southey's name is used in a manner not only unauthorized, but at which he would have sickened.
You and I must differ more widely in our notions of fair play than I hope and believe we do, if you refuse to one whose purpose is neither unjust nor ungenerous, as much license in your columns as you have accorded to Mr. Landor, when it was his whim, without the smallest provocation, to throw obloquy on the venerated author of the Excursion.
I am, Sir, your faithful servant, EDWARD QUILLINAN.
* * * * *
Landor.—Good-morning, Mr. North, I hope you are well.
North.—I thank you, sir.—Be seated.
Landor.—I have called to enquire whether you have considered my proposal, and are willing to accept my aid.
North.—I am almost afraid to trust you, sir. You treat the Muses like nine-pins. Neither gods nor men find favour in your sight. If Homer and Virgil crossed your path, you would throw stones at them.
Landor.—The poems attributed to Homer, were probably, in part at least, translations. He is a better poet than Hesiod, who has, indeed, but little merit![49] Virgil has no originality. His epic poem is a mere echo of the Iliad, softened down in tone for the polite ears of Augustus and his courtiers. Virgil is inferior to Tasso. Tasso's characters are more vivid and distinct than Virgil's, and greatly more interesting. Virgil wants genius. Mezentius is the most heroical and pious of all the characters in the Aeneid. The Aeneid, I affirm, is the most misshapen of epics, an epic of episodes.[50] There are a few good passages in it. I must repeat one for the sake of proposing an improvement.
"Quinetiam hyberno moliris sidere classem, Et mediis properas aquilonibus ire per altum … Crudelis! quod si non arva aliena domosque Ignotas peteres, et Troja antiqua maneret, Troja per undosum peteretur classibus aequor?"
If hybernum were substituted for undosum, how incomparably more beautiful would the sentence be for this energetic repetition? [51]
North.—I admire your modesty, Mr. Landor, in quoting Virgil only to improve him; but your alteration is not an improvement. Dido, having just complained of her lover for putting out to sea under a wintry star, would have uttered but a graceless iteration had she in the same breath added—if Troy yet stood, must even Troy be sought through a wintry sea? Undosum is the right epithet; it paints to the eye the danger of the voyage, and adds force to her complaint.
Landor. Pshaw! You Scotchmen are no scholars. Let me proceed. Virgil has no nature. And, by the way, his translator Dryden, too, is greatly overrated.
North..—Glorious John?
Landor.—Glorious fiddlestick! It is insufferable that a rhymer should be called glorious, whose only claim to notice is a clever drinking song.
North.—A drinking song?
Landor. Yes, the thing termed an Ode for St. Cecilia's Day.
North.—Hegh, sir, indeed! Well, let us go on with the Ancients, and dispatch them first. To revert to the Greeks, from whom Virgil's imitation of the Iliad drew us aside, favour me with your opinion of Plato.
[Footnote 48: See Mr. Landor's "Imaginary Conversations."—Vol. i. p. 44, and ii. p. 322, note.]
[Footnote 50: Vol. i p. 269, 270.]
[Footnote 51: Vol. i. p. 300.]
Landor.—Plato is disingenuous and malicious. I fancy I have detected him in more than one dark passage, a dagger in his hand and a bitter sneer on his countenance.[52] He stole (from the Eyptian priests and other sources) every idea his voluminous books convey. [53] Plato was a thief.
North.—"Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief."
Landor.—Do you mean to insinuate that my dialogues are stolen from Plato's?
North.—Certainly not, Mr. Landor; there is not the remotest resemblance between them. Lucian and Christopher North are your models. What do you think of Aristotle?
Landor.—In Plato we find only arbours and grottoes, with moss and shell work all misplaced. Aristotle has built a solider edifice, but has built it across the road. We must throw it down again. [54]
North.—So much for philosophy. What have you to say to Xenophon as an historian?
Landor.—He is not inelegant, but he is unimpassioned and affected; [55] and he has not even preserved the coarse features of nations and of ages in his Cyropaedia.[56]
North.—The dunce! But what of the Anabasis?
Landor.—You may set Xenophon down as a writer of graceful mediocrity.[57]
North.—Herodotus?
Landor.—If I blame Herodotus, whom can I commend? His view of history was nevertheless like that of the Asiatics, and there can be little to instruct and please us in the actions and speeches of barbarians.[58]
North.—Which of the Greek tragedians do you patronise?
Landor.—Aeschylus is not altogether unworthy of his reputation; he is sometimes grand, but oftener flighty and obscure.[59]
North.—What say you of Sophocles?
Landor.—He is not so good as his master, though the Athenians thought otherwise. He is, however, occasionally sublime.
North.—What of Euripides? [60]
Landor.—He came further down into common life than Sophocles, and he further down than Aeschylus: one would have expected the reverse. Euripides has but little dramatic power. His dialogue is sometimes dull and heavy; the construction of his fable infirm and inartificial, and if in the chorus he assumes another form, and becomes a more elevated poet, he is still at a loss to make it serve the interests of the piece. He appears to have written principally for the purpose of inculcating political and moral axioms. The dogmas, like valets de place, serve any master, and run to any quarter. Even when new, they are nevertheless miserably flat and idle.
North.—Aristophanes ridiculed him.
Landor.—Yes, Aristophanes had, however, but little true wit. [61]
North.—That was lucky for Euripides.
Landor.-A more skilful archer would have pierced him through bone and marrow, and saved him from the dogs of Archelaus.
North.—That story is probably an allegory, signifying that Euripides was after all worried out of life by the curs of criticism in his old age.
Landor.—As our Keats was in his youth, eh, Mr. North? A worse fate than that of Aeschylus, who had his skull cracked by a tortoise dropt by an eagle that mistook his bald head for a stone.
North.—Another fable of his inventive countrymen. He died of brain-fever, followed by paralysis, the effect of drunkenness. He was a jolly old toper: I am sorry for him. You just now said that Aristophanes wanted wit. What foolish fellows then the Athenians must have been, in the very meridian of their literature, to be so delighted with what they mistook for wit as to decree him a crown of olive! He has been styled the Prince of Old Comedy too. How do you like Menander?
[Footnote 52: Vol. ii. p. 298.]
[Footnote 53: Vol. iii p. 514.]
[Footnote 54: Vol. iv. p 80.]
[Footnote 55: Vol. i. p. 233.]
[Footnote 56: Vol. ii. p. 331.]
[Footnote 57: Vol. iii. p. 35.]
[Footnote 58: Vol. ii. p. 332.]
[Footnote 59: Vol. i. pp. 299, 298, 297.]
[Footnote 60: Vol. i. p. 298.]
[Footnote 61: Vol. ii. p. 12.]
Landor.—We have not much of him, unless in Terence. [62] The characters on which Menander raised his glory were trivial and contemptible.
[Footnote 62: Vol. ii. p. 5. At p. 6th, Mr. Landor produces some verses of his own "in the manner of Menander," fathers them on Andrew Marvel, and makes Milton praise them!]
North.—Now that you have demolished the Greeks, let us go back to Rome, and have another touch at the Latins. From Menander to Terence is an easy jump. How do you esteem Terence?
Landor.—Every one knows that he is rather an expert translator from the Greek than an original writer. There is more pith in Plautus.
North.—You like Plautus, then, and endure Terence?
Landor.—I tolerate both as men of some talents; but comedy is, at the best, only a low style of literature; and the production of such trifling stuff is work for the minor geniuses. I have never composed a comedy.
North.—I see: farewell to the sock, then. Is Horace worth his salt?
Landor.—There must be some salt in Horace, or he would not have kept so well. [63] He was a shrewd observer and an easy versifier; but, like all the pusillanimous, he was malignant.
[Footnote 63: Vol. ii. p. 249.]
North.—Seneca?
Landor.—He was, like our own Bacon, hard-hearted and hypocritical, [64] as to his literary merits, Caligula, the excellent emperor and critic, (who made sundry efforts to extirpate the writings of Homer and Virgil,) [65] spoke justly and admirably when he compared the sentences of Seneca to lime without sand.
[Footnote 64: Vol. iv. p. 31.]
[Footnote 65: Vol. i. p. 274.]
North.—Perhaps, after all, you prefer the moderns?
Landor.—I have not said that.
North.—You think well of Spenser?
Landor.—As I do of opium: he sends me to bed [66].
[Footnote 66: Thee, gentle Spenser fondly led, But me he mostly sent to bed.—LANDOR. ]
North.—You concede the greatness of Milton?
Landor.—Yes, when he is great; but his Satan is often a thing to be thrown out of the way among the rods and fools' caps of the nursery [67].
[Footnote 67: Vol. i. p. 301.]
He has sometimes written very contemptibly; his lines on Hobbes, the carrier, for example, and his versions of Psalms. [68] Milton was never so great a regicide as when he smote King David.
[Footnote 68: Blackwood.]
North.—You like, at least, his hatred of kings?
Landor.—That is somewhat after my own heart, I own; but he does not go far enough in his hatred of them.
North.—You do?
Landor.—I despise and abominate them. How many of them, do you think, could name their real fathers? [69]
[Footnote 69: Vol. i. p. 61.]
North.—But, surely, Charles was a martyr?
Landor.—If so, what were those who sold [70] him?
[Footnote 70: Vol. iv. p. 283.]
Ha, ha, ha! You a Scotchman, too! However, Charles was not a martyr. He was justly punished. To a consistent republican, the diadem should designate the victim: all who wear it, all who offer it, all who bow to it, should perish. Rewards should be offered for the heads of those monsters, as for the wolves, the kites, and the vipers. A true republican can hold no milder doctrine of polity, than that all nations, all cities, all communities, should enter into one great hunt, like that of the ancient Scythians at the approach of winter, and should follow up the kingly power unrelentingly to its perdition. [71] True republicans can see no reason why they should not send an executioner to release a king from the prison-house of his crimes, [72] with his family to attend him.
[Footnote 71: Vol. iv. 507.]
[Footnote 72: Vol. i. p. 73.]
In my Dialogues, I have put such sentiments into the mouth of Diogenes, that cynic of sterling stamp, and of Aeschines, that incorruptible orator, as suitable to the maxims of their government. [73] To my readers, I leave the application of them to nearer interests.
[Footnote 73: Mr. Landor, with whom the Cynic is a singular favourite, says, p. 461, vol. iii., that Diogenes was not expelled from Sinope for having counterfeited money; that he only marked false men. Aeschines was accused of having been bribed by Philip of Macedon.]
North.—But you would not yourself, in your individual character, and in deliberate earnestness, apply them to modern times and monarchies?
Landor.—Why not? Look at my Dialogue with De Lille. [74] What have I said of Louis the Fourteenth, the great exemplar of kingship, and of the treatment that he ought to have received from the English? Deprived of all he had acquired by his treachery and violence, unless the nation that brought him upon his knees had permitted two traitors, Harley and St. John, to second the views of a weak woman, and to obstruct those of policy and of England, he had been carted to condign punishment in the Place de GrÊve or at Tyburn. Such examples are much wanted, and, as they can rarely be given, should never be omitted.[75]
[Footnote 74: Vol. i.]
[Footnote 75: Vol. i. p. 281.—Landor.]
North.—The Sans-culottes and Poissardes of the last French revolution but three, would have raised you by acclamation to the dignity of Decollator of the royal family of France for that brave sentiment. But you were not at Paris, I suppose, during the reign of the guillotine, Mr. Landor?
Landor.—I was not, Mr. North. But as to the king whose plethory was cured by that sharp remedy, he, Louis the Sixteenth, was only dragged to a fate which, if he had not experienced it, he would be acknowledged to have deserved. [76]
[Footnote 76: Vol. ii. p. 267. This truculent sentiment the Dialogist imputes to a Spanish liberal. He cannot fairly complain that it is here restored to its owner. It is exactly in accordance with the sentence quoted above in italics—a judgment pronounced by Mr. Landor in person. —Vol. i. p. 281. It also conforms to his philosophy of regicide, as expounded in various parts of his writings. In his preface to the first volume of his Imaginary Conversations, he claims exemption, though somewhat sarcastically, from responsibility for the notions expressed by his interlocutors. An author, in a style which has all the freedom of the dramatic form, without its restraints, should especially abstain from making his work the vehicle of crotchets, prejudices, and passions peculiar to himself, or unworthy of the characters speaking. "This form of composition," Mr. Landor says, "among other advantages, is recommended by the protection it gives from the hostility all novelty (unless it be vicious) excites." Prudent consideration, but indiscreet parenthesis.]
North.—I believe one Englishman, a martyr to liberty, has said something like that before.
Landor.—Who, pray?
North.—The butcher Ings.
Landor.—Ah, I was not aware of it! Ings was a fine fellow.
North.—Your republic will never do here, Mr. Landor.
Landor.—I shall believe that a king is better than a republic when I find that a single tooth in a head is better than a set. [77]
[Footnote 77: Vol. ii. p. 31.]
North.—It would be as good logic in a monarchy-man to say, "I shall believe that a republic is better than a king when I am convinced that six noses on a face would be better than one."
Landor.—In this age of the march of intellect, when a pillar of fire is guiding us out of the wilderness of error, you Tories lag behind, and are lost in darkness, Mr. North. Only the first person in the kingdom should be unenlightened and void, as only the first page in a book should be a blank one. It is when it is torn out that we come at once to the letters. [78]
[Footnote 78: Vol. iv. p. 405.]
North.—Well, now that you have torn out the first page of the Court Guide, we come to the Peers, I suppose.
Landor.—The peerage is the park-paling of despotism, arranged to keep in creatures tame and wild for luxury and diversion, and to keep out the people. Kings are to peerages what poles are to rope-dancers, enabling then to play their tricks with greater confidence and security above the heads of the people. The wisest and the most independent of the English Parliaments declared the thing useless. [79] Peers are usually persons of pride without dignity, of lofty pretensions with low propensities. They invariably bear towards one another a constrained familiarity or frigid courtesy, while to their huntsmen and their prickers, their chaplains and their cooks, (or indeed any other man's,) they display unequivocal signs of ingenuous cordiality.
[Footnote 79: Vol. iv. p. 400.]
How many do you imagine of our nobility are not bastards or sons of bastards? [80]
[Footnote 80: Vol. iv. p. 273.]
North.—You have now settled the Peers. The Baronets come next in order.
Landor.—Baronets are prouder than any thing we see on this side of the Dardanelles, excepting the proctors of universities, and the vergers of cathedrals; and their pride is kept in eternal agitation, both from what is above them and what is below. Gentlemen of any standing (like Walter Savage Landor, of Warwick Castle, and Lantony Abbey in Wales,) are apt to investigate their claims a little too minutely, and nobility has neither bench nor joint-stool for them in the vestibule. During the whole course of your life, have you ever seen one among this, our King James's breed of curs, that either did not curl himself up and lie snug and warm in the lowest company, [81] or slaver and whimper in fretful quest of the highest.
[Footnote 81: Vol. iv. p. 400.]
North.—But you allow the English people to be a great people.
Landor.—I allow them to be a nation of great fools. [82] In England, if you write dwarf on the back of a giant, he will go for a dwarf.
[Footnote 82: Vol. iii. p. 135.]
North.—I perceive; some wag has been chalking your back in that fashion. Why don't you label your breast with the word giant? Perhaps you would then pass for one.
Landor.—I have so labelled it, but in vain.
North.—Yet we have seen some great men, besides yourself, Mr. Landor, in our own day. Some great military commanders, for example; and, as a particular instance, Wellington.
Landor.—It cannot be dissembled that all the victories of the English, in the last fifty years, have been gained by the high courage and steady discipline of the soldier, [83] and the most remarkable where the prudence and skill of the commander were altogether wanting.
[Footnote 83: Vol. ii. p 214.]
North.—Ay, that was a terrible mistake at Waterloo. Yet you will allow Wellington to have been something of a general, if not in India, at least in Spain.
Landor.—Suppose him, or any distinguished general of the English, to have been placed where Murillo was placed in America, Mina in Spain; then inform me what would have been your hopes? [84] The illustrious Mina, [85] of all the generals who have appeared in our age, has displayed the greatest genius, and the greatest constancy. That exalted personage, the admiration of Europe, accomplished the most arduous and memorable work that any one mortal ever brought to its termination.
[Footnote 84: Vol. ii. p. 214.]
[Footnote 85: Vol. ii. p. 3. Ded. "to Mina."—Wilson.]
North.—We have had some distinguished statesmen at the helm in our time, Mr. Landor.
Landor.—Not one.
North.—Mr. Pitt.
Landor.—Your pilot that weathered the storm. Ha, ha! He was the most insidious republican that England ever produced.
North.—You should like him if he was a Republican.
Landor.—But he was a debaser of the people as well as of the peerage. By the most wasteful prodigality both in finance and war, he was enabled to distribute more wealth among his friends and partisans than has been squandered by the uncontrolled profusion of French monarchs from the first Louis to the last. [86] Yet he was more short-sighted than the meanest insect that can see an inch before it. You should have added those equally enlightened and prudent leaders of our Parliament, Lord Castlereagh and his successors. Pitt, indeed! whose requisites for a successful minister were three—to speak like an honest man, to act like a scoundrel, and to be indifferent which he is called. But you have forgotten my dialogue between him and that wretched fellow Canning. [87] I have there given Pitt his quietus. As to Castlereagh and Canning, I have crushed them to powder, spit upon them, kneaded them into dough again; and pulverized them once more. Canning is the man who deserted his party, supplanted his patrons, and abandoned every principle he protested he would uphold. [88] Castlereagh is the statesman who was found richer one day, by a million of zecchins, than he was the day before, and this from having signed a treaty! The only life he ever personally aimed at was the vilest in existence, and none complains that he succeeded in his attempt. [89] I forgot: he aimed at another so like it, (you remember his duel with Canning,) that it is a pity it did not form a part of it.
[Footnote 86: Vol. ii. p. 240, 241, 242.]
[Footnote 87: Vol. iii. p. 66.]
[Footnote 88: Vol. iii. p. 134.]
[Footnote 89: Vol. iii. p. 172, and that there should be no mistake as to the person indicated, Lord Castlereagh is again accused by name at p. 187. The same charge occurs also in the dialogue between Aristotle and Calisthenes! p 334, 335, 336; where Prince Metternich, (Metanyctius,) the briber, is himself represented as a traitor to his country. Aristotle is the teller of this cock-and-bull story!]
North.—Horrible! most horrible!
Landor.—Hear Epicurus and Leontion and Ternissa discuss the merits of Castlereagh and Canning.
North.—Epicurus! What, the philosopher who flourished some centuries before the Christian era?
Landor.—The same. He flourishes still for my purposes.
North.—And who are Leontion and Ternissa?
Landor.—Two of his female pupils.
North.—Oh, two of his misses! And how come they and their master, who lived above 2000 years before the birth of Canning and Castlereagh, to know any thing about them?
Landor.—I do not stand at trifles of congruity. Canning is the very man who has taken especial care that no strong box among us shall be without a chink at the bottom; the very man who asked and received a gratuity (you remember the Lisbon job) [90] from the colleague he had betrayed, belied, and thrown a stone at, for having proved him in the great market-place a betrayer and a liar. Epicurus describes Canning as a fugitive slave, a writer of epigrams on walls, and of songs on the grease of platters, who attempted to cut the throat of a fellow in the same household, [91] who was soon afterward more successful in doing it himself.
[Footnote 90: Vol. iv. p. 194.]
[Footnote 91: Vol. iv. p. 194.]
North.—Horrible, most horrible mockery! But even that is not new. It is but Byron's brutal scoff repeated—"Carotid-artery-cutting Castlereagh."
Landor.—You Tories affect to be so squeamish. Epicurus goes on to show Canning's ignorance of English.
North.—Epicurus! Why not William Cobbett?
Landor.—The Athenian philosopher introduces the trial of George the Fourth's wife, and describes her as a drunken old woman, the companion of soldiers and sailors, and lower and viler men. One whose eyes, as much as can be seen of them, are streaky fat floating in semi-liquid rheum.
North.—And this is the language of Epicurus to his female pupils! He was ever such a beast.
Landor.—You are delicate. He goes on to allude to Canning's having called her the pride, the life, the ornament of society, (you know he did so call her in the House of Commons, according to the newspaper reports; it is true he was speaking of what she had been many years previously; before her departure from England.) [92] Epicurus says triumphantly that the words, if used at all, should have been placed thus—the ornament, pride, and life; for hardly a Boeotian bullock-driver would have wedged in life between pride and ornament.
[Footnote 92: Vol. iv. p. 194, 195.—Pericles and Sophocles also prattle about Queen Caroline! vol. 2, p. 106, 107.—In another place the judgment and style of Johnson being under sentence, the Doctor's judgment is "alike in all things," that is, "unsound and incorrect;" and as to style, "a sentence of Johnson is like a pair of breeches, an article of dress, divided into two parts, equal in length, breadth, and substance, with a protuberance before and behind." The contour of Mr. Landor's figure can hardly be so graceful as that of the Pythian Apollo, if his dress-breeches are made in this fashion, and "his Florentine tailor never fails to fit him."—See vol. i. p. 296, and p. 185, note.]
North.—What dignified and important criticism! and how appropriate from the lips of Epicurus! But why were you, Mr. Landor, so rancorous against that miserable Queen Caroline? You have half choked Sir Robert Wilson, one of her champions, and the marshal of her coffin's royal progress through London, with a reeking panegyric in your dedication to him [93] of a volume of your Talks.
[Footnote 93: Vol. iii.]
Landor.—I mistook Wilson for an uncompromising Radical. As to his and Canning's nobled Queen, I confess I owed her a grudge for disrespect to me at Como long before.
North.—How? Were you personally acquainted with her?
Landor.—Not at all: She was not aware that there was such a man as Walter Savage Landor upon earth, or she would have taken care that I should not be stopt by her porter at the lodge-gate, when I took a fancy to pry into the beauties of her pleasure-ground.
North.—Then her disrespect to you was not only by deputy, but even without her cognisance?
Landor.—Just so.
North.—And that was the offence for which you assailed her with such a violent invective after her death?
Landor.—Oh no! it might possibly have sharpened it a little; but I felt it my duty, as a censor of morals, to mark my reprobation of her having grown fat and wrinkled in her old age. It was necessary for me to correct the flattering picture drawn of her by that caitiff Canning. You know the contempt of Demosthenes for Canning.
North.—Demosthenes, too!
Landor.—Yes, in my dialogue between him and Eubulides, he delineates Canning as a clumsy and vulgar man.
North.—Every one knows that he was a man of remarkably fine person and pleasing manners.
Landor.—Never mind that—A vulgar and clumsy man, a market-place demagogue, lifted on a honey-barrel by grocers and slave-merchants, with a dense crowd around him, who listen in rapture because his jargon is unintelligible. [94] Demosthenes, you know, was a Liverpool electioneering agent, so he knew all about Canning and his tricks, and his abstraction of L.14,000 sterling from the public treasury to defray the expenses of his shameful flight to Lesbos, that is Lisbon.[95]
[Footnote 94: Vol. i. p. 245.]
[Footnote 95: Vol. i. p. 247. This charge against Canning is repeated at Vol. iii. p. 186, 187, and again at Vol. iv. p. 193.]
North.—Has England produced no honest men of eminence, Mr. Landor?
Landor.—Very few; I can, however, name two—Archbishop Boulter and Philip Savage. [96] I am not certain that I should ever have thought of recording their merits, if their connexion with my own family had not often reminded me of them; we do not always bear in mind very retentively what is due to others, unless there is something at home to stimulate the recollection. Boulter, Primate of Ireland, saved that kingdom from pestilence and famine in 1729 by supplying the poor with bread, medicines, attendance, and every possible comfort and accommodation. Again, in 1740 and 1741, no fewer than 250,000 persons were fed, twice a-day, principally at his expense. Boulter was certainly the most disinterested, the most humane, the most beneficent, and after this it is little to say, the most enlightened and learned man that ever guided the counsels of a kingdom.[97] Mr. Philip Savage, Chancellor of the Exchequer, married his wife's sister, of his own name, but very distantly related. This minister was so irreproachable, that even Swift could find no fault with him. [97] He kept a groom in livery, and two saddle-horses.
[Footnote 96: Also Vol. iii. p. 92.]
[Footnote 97: Vol. iii. p. 91, 92, note.]
North.—Is it possible? And these great men were of your family, Mr. Landor!
Landor.—I have told you so, sir—Philip was one of my Savage ancestors, [98] and he and Boulter married sisters, who were also Savages.
[Footnote 98: Vol. iii. p. 92, note.]
North.—You have lived a good while in Italy? You like the Italians, I believe?
Landor.—I despise and abominate the Italians; and I have taken some pains to show it in various ways. During my long residence at Florence I was the only Englishman there, I believe, who never went to court, leaving it to my hatter, who was a very honest man, and my breeches-maker, who never failed to fit me. [99] The Italians were always—far exceeding all other nations—parsimonious and avaricious, the Tuscans beyond all other Italians, the Florentines beyond all other Tuscans. [100]
[Footnote 99: Vol. i. p. 185.]
[Footnote 100: Vol. i. p. 219.]
North.—But even Saul was softened by music: surely that of Italy must have sometimes soothed you?
Landor.—Opera was, among the Romans, labour, as operae pretium, &c. It now signifies the most contemptible of performances, the vilest office of the feet and tongue. [101]
[Footnote 101: Vol. i. p. 212.]
North.—But the sculptors, the painters, the architects of Italy? You smile disdainfully, Mr. Landor!
Landor.—I do; their sculpture and painting have been employed on most ignoble objects—on scourgers and hangmen, on beggarly enthusiasts and base impostors. Look at the two masterpieces of the pencil; the Transfiguration of Raphael, and the St. Jerome of Correggio; [102] can any thing be more incongruous, any thing more contrary to truth and history?
[Footnote 102: Vol. i. p. 109, note.]
North.—There have been able Italian writers both in verse and prose?
Landor.—In verse not many, in prose hardly any.
North.—Boccaccio?
Landor.—He is entertaining.
North.—Machiavelli?
Landor.—A coarse comedian. [103]
[Footnote 103: Vol. ii. p. 252.]
North.—You honour Ariosto?
Landor.—I do not. Ariosto is a plagiary, the most so of all poets. [104] Ariosto is negligent; his plan inartificial, defective, bad.
[Footnote 104: Vol. i. p. 290.]
North.—You protect Tasso?
Landor.—I do, especially against his French detractors.
North.—But you esteem the French?
Landor.—I despise and abominate the French.
North.—And their literature!
Landor.—And their literature. As to their poets, bad as Ariosto is, divide the Orlando into three parts, and take the worst of them, and although it may contain a large portion of extremely vile poetry, it will contain more of good than the whole French language. [105]
[Footnote 105: Vol. i. p. 290.]
North.—Is Boileau so very contemptible?
Landor.—Beneath contempt. He is a grub. [106]
[Footnote 106: See Mr. Landor's Polite Conversation with De Lille, Vol. i. and Note at the end, p. 309, 310.]
North.—Racine?
Landor.—Diffuse, feeble, and, like Boileau, meanly thievish. The most admired verse of Racine is stolen, [107] so is almost every other that is of any value.
[Footnote 107: Vol. i. p. 293, 294.]
North.—But Voltaire, Mr. Landor?
Landor.—Voltaire, sir, was a man of abilities, and author of many passable epigrams, besides those which are contained in his tragedies and heroics, [108] though, like Parisian lackeys, they are usually the smartest when out of place. I tell you I detest and abominate every thing French. [109]
[Footnote 108: Vol. i. p. 254.]
[Footnote 109: We, however, find Mr. Landor giving the French credit for their proceedings in one remarkable instance, and it is so seldom that we catch him in good-humour with any thing, that we will not miss an opportunity of exhibiting him in an amiable light. This champion of the liberties of the world, who has cracked his lungs in endeavouring, on the shores of Italy, to echo the lament of Byron over Greece, and who denounced the powers of Europe for suffering the Duke d'AngoulÊme to assist his cousin Ferdinand in retaking the Trocadero, yet approves of French proceedings in Spain on a previous occasion. Admiring reader! you shall hear Sir Oracle himself again:— "The laws and institutions introduced by the French into Spain were excellent, and the king" (Joseph Bonaparte!) "was liberal, affable, sensible, and humane." Poor Trelawney, the friend of Byron, is made to talk thus! Both Trelawney and Odysseus the noble Greek, to whom he addresses himself, were more likely to participate in the "indignation of a high-minded Spaniard," so vividly expressed by a high-minded Englishman in the following sonnet:—
"We can endure that he should waste our lands, Despoil our temples, and, by sword and flame, Return us to the dust from which we came; Such food a tyrant's appetite demands: And we can brook the thought, that by his hands Spain may be overpower'd, and he possess, For his delight, a solemn wilderness, Where all the brave lie dead. But, when of bands That he will break for us he dares to speak, Of benefits, and of a future day When our enlighten'd minds shall bless his sway— Then the strain'd heart of fortitude proves weak; Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear."]
North.—Well, Mr. Landor, we have rambled over much ground; we have journeyed from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Let us return home.
Landor.—Before we do so, let me observe, that among several noted Italians whom you have not glanced at, there is one whom I revere—Alfieri. He was the greatest man of his time in Europe, though not acknowleged or known to be so; [110] and he well knew his station as a writer and as a man. Had he found in the world five equal to himself, he would have walked out of it not to be jostled. [111]
[Footnote 110: Vol. ii. p. 241.]
[Footnote 111: Vol. ii. p. 258.]
North.—He would have been sillier, then, than the flatulent frog in the fable. Yet Alfieri's was, indeed, no ordinary mind, and he would have been a greater poet than he was, had he been a better man. I admire his Bruto Primo as much as you do, and I am glad to hear you give your suffrage so heartily in favour of any one.
Landor.—Sir, I admire the man as much as I do the poet. It is not every one who can measure his height; I can.
North.—Pop! there you go! you have got out of the bottle again, and are swelling and vapouring up to the clouds. Do lower yourself to my humble stature, (I am six feet four in my slippers.) Alfieri reminds me of Byron. What of him?
Landor.—A sweeper of the Haram. [112] A sweeper of the Haram is equally in false costume whether assuming the wreath of Musaeus or wearing the bonnet of a captain of Suliotes. I ought to have been chosen a leader of the Greeks. I would have led them against the turbaned Turk to victory, armed not with muskets or swords but with bows and arrows, and mailed not in steel cuirasses or chain armour but in cork caps and cork shirts. Nothing is so cool to the head as cork, and by the use of cork armour the soldier who cannot swim has all the advantage of him who can. At the head of my swimming archers I would have astonished the admirers of Leander and Byron in the Dardanelles, and I would have proved myself a Duck worth two of the gallant English admiral who tried in vain to force that passage. The Sultan should have beheld us in Stamboul, and we would have fluttered his dovecote within the Capi—-
[Footnote 112: Vol. i. p. 301.—Vol. ii. p. 222, 223.]
North.—I will not tempt you further. Let us proceed to business. To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit, Mr. Landor?
Landor.—I sent you the manuscript of a new Imaginary Conversation between Porsou and Southey.
North.—A sort of abnegation of your former one. For what purpose did you send it to me?
Landor.—For your perusal. Have you read it?
North.—I have, and I do not find it altogether new.
Landor.—How?
North.—I have seen some part of it in print before.
Landor.—Where?
North.—In a production of your own.
Landor.—Impossible!
North.—In a rhymed lampoon printed in London in 1836. It is called "A Satire on Satirists, and Admonition to Detractors." Do you know such a thing?
Landor.—(Aside. Unlucky! some good-natured friend has sent him that suppressed pamphlet.) Yes, Mr. North; a poetical manifesto of mine with that title was printed but not published.
North.—No, only privately distributed among friends. It contained some reflections on Wordsworth.
Landor.—It did.
North.—Why did you suppress it?
Landor.—Because I was ashamed of it. Byron and others had anticipated me. I had produced nothing either new or true to damage Wordsworth.
North.—Yet you have now, in this article that you offer me, reproduced the same stale gibes.
Landor.—But I have kept them in salt for six years: they will now have more flavour. I have added some spice, too.
North.—Which you found wrapt up in old leaves of the Edinburgh Review.
Landor.—Not the whole of it; a part was given to me by acquaintances of the poet.
North.—Eavesdroppers about Rydal Mount and Trinity Lodge. It was hardly worth your acceptance.
Landor.—Then you refuse my article.
North.—It is a rare article, Mr. Landor—a brave caricature of many persons and things; but, before I consent to frame it in ebony, we must come to some understanding about other parts of the suppressed pamphlet. Here it is. I find that in this atrabilarious effusion you have treated ourselves very scurvily. At page 9 I see,
"Sooner shall Tuscan Vallambrosa lack wood, Than Britain, Grub street, Billingsgate, and Blackwood."
Then there is a note at page 10: "Who can account for the eulogies of Blackwood on Sotheby's Homer as compared with Pope's and Cowper's? Eulogy is not reported to be the side he lies upon, in general." On the same page, and the next, you say of Us, high Churchmen and high Tories,
"Beneath the battlements of Holyrood There never squatted a more sordid brood Than that which now, across the clotted perch, Crookens the claw and screams for Court and Church."
Then again at page 12,
"Look behind you, look! There issues from the Treasury, dull and dry as The leaves in winter, Gifford and Matthias. Brighter and braver Peter Pindar started, And ranged around him all the lighter-hearted, When Peter Pindar sank into decline, Up from his hole sprang Peter Porcupine"
All which is nothing to Us, but what does it lead to?
"Him W … son follow'd"—
Why those dots, Mr. Landor?
"Him W … son follow'd, of congenial quill, As near the dirt and no less prone to ill. Walcot, of English heart, had English pen, Buffoon he might be, but for hire was none; Nor plumed and mounted in Professor's chair Offer'd to grin for wages at a fair."
The rest is too foul-mouthed for repetition. You are a man of nasty ideas, Mr. Landor. You append a note, in which, without any authority but common rumour, you exhibit the learned Professor as an important contributor to Blackwood, especially in those graces of delicate wit so attractive to his subcribers. You declare, too, that we fight under cover, and only for spite and pay; that honester and wiser satirists were brave, that—
"Their courteous soldiership, outshining ours, Mounted the engine and took aim from towers;"
But that
"From putrid ditches we more safely fight, And push our zig-zag parallels by night."
Again, at page 19—
"The Gentleman's, the Lady's we have seen, Now blusters forth the Blackguard's Magazine; And (Heaven from joint-stock companies protect us!) Dustman and nightman issue their prospectus."
Landor (who has sate listening, with a broad grin, while Mr. North was getting rather red in the face.)—Really, Mr. North, considering that you have followed the trade of a currier for the last thirty years, you are remarkably sensitive to any little experiment on your own skin. Put what has my unpublished satire to do with our present affair?
North.—The answer to that question I will borrow from the satire itself, as you choose to term your scurrilous lampoon. Our present affair, then, is to consider whether Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation writer, in rushlight emulation of the wax-candles that illumine our Noctes, shall be raised, as he aspires, to the dignity of Fellow of the Blackwood Society. In the note at page 13 of the said lampoon, you state that "Lord Byron declared that no gentleman could write in Blackwood;" and you ask, "Has this assertion been ever disproved by experiment?" Now, Mr. Landor, as you have thus adopted and often re-echoed Lord Byron's opinion, that no gentleman could write in Blackwood, and yet wish to enrol yourself among our writers, what is the inference?
Landor. That I confess myself no gentleman, you would infer. I make no such confession. I would disprove Byron's assertion, by making the experiment.
North. You do us too much honour. Yet reflect, Mr. Landor. After the character you have given us, would you verily seek to be of our fraternity? You who have denounced us so grandiloquently—you who claim credit for lofty and disinterested principles of action? Recollect that you have represented us as the worthy men who have turned into ridicule Lamb, Keats, Hazlitt, Coleridge—(diverse metals curiously graduated!)—all in short, who, recently dead, are now dividing among them the admiration of their country. Whatever could lessen their estimation; whatever could injure their fortune; whatever could make their poverty more bitter; whatever could tend to cast down their aspirations after fame; whatever had a tendency to drive them to the grave which now has opened to them, was incessantly brought into action against them by us zealots for religion and laws. A more deliberate, a more torturing murder, never was committed, than the murder of Keats. The chief perpetrator of his murder knew beforehand that he could not be hanged for it. These are your words, Mr. Landor.
Landor.—I do not deny them.
North.—And in regard to the taste of the common public for Blackwood's Cordials, you have said that, to those who are habituated to the gin-shop, the dram is sustenance, and they feel themselves both uncomfortable and empty without the hot excitement. Blackwood's is really a gin-palace. Landor.—All this I have both said and printed, and the last sentence you have just read from my satire is preceded by one that you have not read. An exposure of the impudence and falsehood of Blackwood's Magazine is not likely to injure its character, or diminish the number of its subscribers; and in this sentence you have the secret of my desire to become a contributor to Blackwood. I want a popular vehicle to convey my censures to the world, especially on Wordsworth. I do not pretend to have any love for you and your brotherhood, Mr. North. But I dislike you less than I do Wordsworth; and I frankly own to you, that the fame of that man is a perpetual blister to my self-love.
North.—Your habitual contemplation of his merits has confused you into a notion that they are your own, and you think him an usurper of the laurel crown that is yours by the divine right of genius. What an unhappy monomania! Still, your application for redress to us is unaccountable. You should know that we Black Foresters, lawless as you may suppose us, are Wordsworth's liegemen. He is our intellectual Chief. We call him the General! We are ever busy in promoting his fame.
Landor.—You are always blowing hot and cold on it, and have done so for years past. One month you place him among the stars, the next as low as the daisies.
North.—And rightly too; for both are the better for his presence.
Landor.—But you alternately worship and insult him, as some people do their wooden idols.
North.—If you must learn the truth, then, he has been to us, in one sense, nothing better than an unfeeling wooden idol. Some of us have been provoked by his indifference to our powers of annoyance, and his ingratitude in not repaying eulogy in kind. We have among ourselves a gander or two, (no offence, Mr. Landor,) that, forgetting they are webfooted, pretend to a perch on the tall bay-tree of Apollo, and, though heavy of wing, are angry with Wordsworth for not encouraging their awkward flights. They, like you, accuse him of jealousy, forsooth! That is the reason that they are now gabbling at his knees, now hissing at his heels. Moreover, our caprices are not unuseful to our interests. We alternately pique and soothe readers by them, and so keep our customers. As day is partitioned between light and darkness, so has the public taste as to Wordsworth been divided between his reverers and the followers of the Jeffrey heresy. After a lengthened winter, Wordsworth's glory is now in the long summer days; all good judgments that lay torpid have been awakened, and the light prevails against the darkness. But as bats and owls, the haters of light, are ever most restless in the season when nights are shortest, so are purblind egotists most uneasy when their dusky range is contracted by the near approach and sustained ascendancy of genius. We now put up a screen for the weak-sighted, now withdraw it from stronger eyes; thus we plague and please all parties.
Landor.—Except Wordsworth, whose eyelids are too tender to endure his own lustre reflected and doubled on the focus of your burnished brass. He dreads the fate of Milton, "blasted with excess of light."
North. Thank you, sir; that is an ingenious way of accounting for Wordsworth's neglect of our luminous pages. Yet it rather sounds like irony, coming from Mr. Walter Savage Landor to the editor of "The (Not Gentleman's) Magazine."
Landor.—Pshaw! still harping on my Satire.
North.—In that Satire you have charged Wordsworth with having talked of Southey's poetry as not worth five shillings a ream. So long as you refrained from publishing this invidious imputation, even those few among Wordsworth's friends who knew that you had printed it, (Southey himself among the number,) might think it discreet to leave the calumny unregarded. But I observe that you have renewed it, in a somewhat aggravated form, in the Article that you now wish me to publish. You here allege that Wordsworth represented Southey as an author, all whose poetry was not worth five shillings. You and I both know that Wordsworth would not deign to notice such an accusation. Through good and evil report, the brave man persevered in his ascent to the mountain-top, without ever even turning round to look upon the rabble that was hooting him from its base; and he is not likely now to heed such a charge as this. But his friends may now ask, on what authority it is published? Was it to you, Mr. Walter Landor, whom Southey (in his strange affection for the name of Wat) had honoured with so much kindness—to you whose "matin chirpings" he had so generously encouraged, (as he did John Jones's "mellower song,")—was it to you that Wordsworth delivered so injurious a judgment on the works of your patron? If so, what was your reply? [113]
[Footnote 113: "I lagg'd; he (Southey) call'd me; urgent to prolong My matin chirpings into mellower song."—LANDON. ]
Landor.—Whether it was expressed to myself or not, is of little consequence; it has been studiously repeated, and even printed by others as well as by me.
North.—By whom?
Landor.—That, too, is of no importance to the fact.
North.—I am thoroughly convinced that it is no fact, and that Wordsworth never uttered any thing like such an opinion in the sense that you report it. He and Southey have been constant neighbours and intimate friends for forty years; there has never been the slightest interruption to their friendship. Every one that knows Wordsworth is aware of his frank and fearless openness in conversation. He has been beset for the last half century, not only by genuine admirers, but by the curious and idle of all ranks and of many nations, and sometimes by envious and designing listeners, who have misrepresented and distorted his casual expressions. Instances of negligent and infelicitous composition are numerous in Southey, as in most voluminous authors. Suppose some particular passage of this kind to have been under discussion, and Mr. Wordsworth to have exclaimed, "I would not give five shillings a ream for such poetry as that." Southey himself would only smile, (he had probably heard Wordsworth express himself to the same effect a hundred times); but some insidious hearer catches at the phrase, and reports it as Wordsworth's sweeping denunciation of all the poetry that his friend has ever written, in defiance of all the evidence to the contrary to be met with, not only in Wordsworth's every-day conversation, but in his published works. There is no man for whose genius Mr. Wordsworth has more steadily or consistently testified his admiration than for Southey's; there is none for whom, and for whose character, he has evinced more affection and respect. You and I, who have both read his works, and walked and talked with the Old Man of the Mountain, know that perfectly well. You have perhaps been under his roof, at Rydal Mount? I have; and over his dining-room fireplace I observed, as hundreds of his visitors must have done, five portraits—Chaucer's, Bacon's, Spenser's, Shakspeare's, and Milton's, in one line. On the same line is a bust on the right of these, and a portrait on the left; and there are no other ornaments on that wall of the apartment. That bust and that portrait are both of Southey, the man whom you pretend he has so undervalued! By the bye, no one has been more ardent in praise of Wordsworth than yourself.
Landor.—You allude to the first dialogue between Southey and Porson, in Vol. i. of my Imaginary Conversations.
North.—Not to that only, though in that dialogue there are sentiments much at variance with those which you would now give out as Porson's. For example, remember what Porson there says of the Laodamia.
Landor.—The most fervid expression in commendation of it is printed as Porson's improperly, as the whole context shows. It should have been Southey's.
North.—So, I perceive, you say in this new dialogue; and such a mode of attempting to turn your back on yourself, to borrow a phrase from your friend Lord Castlereagh's rhetoric, will be pronounced, even by those who do not care a bawbee about the debate, as not only ludicrous, but pitiably shabby. Keep your seat, Mr. Landor, and keep your temper for once in your life. Let us examine into this pretended mistake in your former dialogue about Laodamia. Well, as you are up, do me the favour, sir, to mount the ladder, and take down from yon top shelf the first volume of your Conversations. Up in the corner, on the left hand, next the ceiling. You see I have given you a high place.
Landor.—Here is the book, Mr. North; it is covered with dust and cobwebs.
North.—The fate of classics, Mr. Landor. They are above the reach of the housemaid, except when she brings the Turk's Head to bear upon them. Now, let us turn to the list of errata in this first volume. We are directed to turn to page 52, line 4, and for sugar-bakers, read sugar-bakers' wives. I turn to the page, and find the error corrected by yourself; as are all the press errors in these volumes, which were presented by you to a friend. I bought the whole set for an old song at a sale. You see that the omitted word wives is carefully supplied by yourself, in your own handwriting, Mr. Landor. On the same page, only five lines below this correction, is the identical passage that you would now transfer from Porson to Southey. Why did you not affix Porson's name to the passage then, when you were so vigilantly perfecting the very page? Why does no such correction appear even in the printed list of errata? Let us read the passage. "A current of rich and bright thoughts runs throughout the poem. [114] Pindar himself would not, on that subject, have braced one into more nerve and freshness, nor Euripides have inspired into it more tenderness and passion."
[Footnote 114: Vol. i. p. 52.]
Landor.—Mr. North, I repeat that that sentence should have been printed as Southey's, not Porson's.
North.—Yet it is quite consistent with a preceding sentence which you can by no ingenuity of after-thought withdraw from Porson; for the whole context forbids the possibility of its transition. What does Porson there testify of the Laodamia? That it is "a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own!"—and a part of one of its stanzas "might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the Elysium the poet describes." [115]
[Footnote 115: Vol. i. p. 51. Few persons will think that Mr. Landor's drift, which is obvious enough, could be favoured if these passages could be all shuffled over to Mr. Southey. It would be unwise and inconsistent in Mr. Landor of all men to intimate that Southey's judgment in poetry was inferior to Porson's; for Southey has been so singular as to laud some of Mr. Landor's, and Mr. Landor has been so grateful as to proclaim Southey the sole critic of modern times who has shown "a delicate perception in poetry." It is rash, too, in him to insinuate that Southey's opinion could be influenced by his friendship; for he, the most amiable of men, was nevertheless a friend of Mr. Lander also. But the only object of this argument is to show how mal-adroitly Mr. Landor plays at thimblerig. He lets us see him shift the pea. As for the praise and censure contained in his dialogues, we have no doubt that any one concerned willingly makes him a present of both. It is but returning bad money to Diogenes. It is all Mr. Landor's; and, lest there should be any doubt about the matter, he has taken care to tell us that he has not inserted in his dialogues a single sentence written by, or recorded of, the persons who are supposed to hold them.—See Vol. i. p. 96, end of note.]
These expressions are at least as fervid as those which you would reclaim from Porson, now that, like a pettifogging practitioner, you want to retain him as counsel against the most illustrious of Southey's friends—the individual of whom in this same dialogue you cause Southey to ask, "What man ever existed who spent a more retired, a more inoffensive, a more virtuous life, than Wordsworth, or who has adorned it with nobler studies?"—and what does Porson answer? "I believe so; I have always heard it; and those who attack him with virulence or with levity are men of no morality and no reflection." [116] Thus you print Wordsworth's praise in rubric, and fix it on the walls, and then knock your head against them. You must have a hard skull, Mr. Landor.
[Footnote 116: Vol. i. p. 40.]
Landor.—Be civil, Mr. North, or I will brain you.
North.—Pooh, pooh, man! all your Welsh puddles, which you call pools, wouldn't hold my brains. To return to your proffered article, there is one very ingenious illustration in it. "Diamonds sparkle the most brilliantly on heads stricken by the palsy."
Landor.—Yes; I flatter myself that I have there struck out a new and beautiful, though somewhat melancholy thought.
North.—New! My good man, it isn't yours; you have purloined those diamonds.
Landor.—From whom?
North.—From the very poet you would disparage—Wordsworth.
"Diamonds dart their brightest lustre From the palsy-shaken head."
Those lines have been in print above twenty years.
Landor.—An untoward coincidence of idea between us.
North.—Both original, no doubt; only, as Puff says in the Critic, one of you thought of it the first, that's all. But how busy would Wordsworth be, and how we should laugh at him for his pains, if he were to set about reclaiming the thousands of ideas that have been pilfered from him, and have been made the staple of volumes of poems, sermons, and philosophical treatises without end! He makes no stir about such larcenies. And what a coil have you made about that eternal sea-shell, which you say he stole from you, and which, we know, is the true and trivial cause of your hostility towards him!
Landor.—Surely I am an ill-used man, Mr. North. My poetry, if not worth five shillings, nor thanks, nor acknowledgment, was yet worth borrowing and putting on. I, the author of Gebir, Mr. North, —do you mark me?
North.—Yes; the author of Gebir and Gebirus; think of that, St. Crispin and Crispanus!
"Sing me the fates of Gebir, and the Nymph Who challenged Tamar to a wrestling match, And on the issue pledged her precious shell. Above her knees she drew the robe succinct; Above her breast, and just below her arms. 'She, rushing at him, closed, and floor'd him flat. And carried off the prize, a bleating sheep; The sheep she carried easy as a cloak, And left the loser blubbering from his fall, And for his vanish'd mutton. Nymph divine! I cannot wait describing how she came; My glance first lighted on her nimble feet; Her feet resembled those long shells explored By him who, to befriend his steed's dim sight, Would blow the pungent powder in his eye.'" [117]
Is that receipt for horse eye-powder to be found in White's Farriery, Mr. Landor?
[Footnote 117: The lines within inverted commas, are Mr. Landor's, without alteration.]
Landor.—Perhaps not, Mr. North. Will you cease your fooling, and allow me to proceed? "I," the author of Gebir, "never lamented when I believed it lost." The MS. was mislaid at my grandmother's, and lay undiscovered for four years. "I saw it neglected; and never complained. Southey and Forster have since given it a place whence men of lower stature are in vain on tiptoe to take it down. It would have been honester and more decorous if the writer of certain verses had mentioned from what bar he took his wine." [118] Now keep your ears open, Mr. North; I will read my verses first, and then Wordsworth's. Here they are. I always carry a copy of them both in my pocket. Listen!
[Footnote 118: Mr. Landor's printed complaint, verbatim, from his "Satire on Satirists."]
North.—List, oh list! I am all attention, Mr. Landor.
Landor (reads.)—
"But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where, when unyoked, His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave."
"Shake one, and it awakens—then apply Its polish'd lip to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there."
These are lines for you, sir! They are mine. What do you think of them?
North.—I think very well of them; they remind one of Coleridge's "Eolian Harp." They are very pretty lines, Mr. Landor. I have written some worse myself.
Landor—So has Wordsworth. Attend to the echo in the Excursion.
"I have seen A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground, applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipp'd shell, To which, in silence hush'd, his very soul Listen'd intensely, and his countenance soon Brighten'd with joy; for, murmuring from within, Were heard sonorous cadences, whereby, To his belief, the monitor express'd Mysterious union with its native sea."
North.—There is certainly much resemblance between the two passages; and, so far as you have recited Wordsworth's, his is not superior to yours; which very likely, too, suggested it; though that is by no means a sure deduction, for the thought itself is as common as the sea-shell you describe, and, in all probability, at least as old as the Deluge.
Landor.—"It is but justice to add, that this passage has been the most admired of any in Mr. Wordsworth's great poem." [119]
[Footnote 119: From Mr. Landor, verbatim.]
North.—Hout, tout, man! The author of the Excursion could afford to spare you a thousand finer passages, and he would seem none the poorer. As to the imputed plagiarism, Wordsworth would no doubt have avowed it had he been conscious that it was one, and that you could attach so much importance to the honour of having reminded him of a secret in conchology, known to every old nurse in the country, as well as to every boy or girl that ever found a shell on the shore, or was tall enough to reach one off a cottage parlour mantelpiece; but which he could apply to a sublime and reverent purpose, never dreamed of by them or you. It is in the application of the familiar image, that we recognise the master-hand of the poet. He does not stop when he has described the toy, and the effect of air within it. The lute in Hamlet's hands is not more philosophically dealt with. There is a pearl within Wordsworth's shell, which is not to be found in your's, Mr. Landor. He goes on:—
"Even such a shell the universe itself Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times, I doubt not, when to you it cloth impart Authentic tidings of invisible things— Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power, And central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation."
These are the lines of a poet, who not only stoops to pick up a shell now and then, as he saunters along the sea-shore, but who is accustomed to climb to the promontory above, and to look upon the ocean of things:—
"From those imaginative heights that yield Far-stretching views into eternity."
Do not look so fierce again, Mr. Landor. You who are so censorious of self-complacency in others, and indeed of all other people's faults, real or imagined, should endure to have your vanity rebuked.
Landor.—I have no vanity. I am too proud to be vain.
North.—Proud of what?
Landor.—Of something beyond the comprehension of a Scotchman, Mr. North—proud of my genius.
North.—Are you so very great a genius, Mr. Landor?
Landor.—I am. Almighty Homer is twice far above Troy and her towers, Olympus and Jupiter. First, when Priam bends before Achilles, and a second time, when the shade of Agamemnon speaks among the dead. That awful spectre, called up by genius in after-time, shook the Athenian stage. That scene was ever before me; father and daughter were ever in my sight; I felt their looks, their words, and again I gave them form and utterance; and, with proud humility, I say it—
"I am tragedian in this scene alone. Station the Greek and Briton side by side And if derision be deserved—deride."
Surely there can be no fairer method of overturning an offensive reputation, from which the scaffolding is not yet taken down, than by placing against it the best passages, and most nearly parallel, in the subject, from Æschylus and Sophocles. To this labour the whole body of the Scotch critics and poets are invited, and, moreover, to add the ornaments of translation. [120]
[Footnote 120: This strange rhapsody is verily Mr. Landor's. It is extracted from his "Satire on the Satirists."]
North.—So you are not only a match for Æschylus and Sophocles, but on a par with "almighty Homer when he is far above Olympus and Jove." Oh! ho! ho! As you have long since recorded that modest opinion of yourself in print, and not been lodged in Bedlam for it, I will not now take upon myself to send for a straight-waistcoat.
Landor.—Is this the treatment I receive fron the Editor of Blackwood's Magazine, in return for my condescension in offering him my assistance? Give me back my manuscript, sir. I was indeed a fool to come hither. I see how it is. You Scotchmen are all alike. We consider no part of God's creation so cringing, so insatiable, so ungrateful as the Scotch: nevertheless, we see them hang together by the claws, like bats; and they bite and scratch you to the bone if you attempt to put an Englishman in the midst of them. [121] But you shall answer for this usage, Mr. North: you shall suffer for it. These two fingers have more power than all your malice, sir, even if you had the two Houses of Parliament to back you. A pen! You shall live for it. [122]
[Footnote 121: Imaginary Conversations, vol. iv, p. 283.]
[Footnote 122: Ibid. vol. i. p. 126.]
North.—Fair and softly, Mr. Landor; I have not rejected your article yet. I am going to be generous. Notwithstanding all your abuse of Blackwood and his countrymen, I consent to exhibit you to the world as a Contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, and, in the teeth of all your recorded admiration of Wordsworth, I will allow you to prove yourself towards him a more formidable critic than Wakley, and a candidate for immortality with Lauder. Do you rue?
Landor.—Not at all. I have past the Rubicon.
North.—Is that a pun? It is worthy of Plato. Mr. Landor, you have been a friend of Wordsworth. But, as he says—
"What is friendship? Do not trust her, Nor the vows which she has made; Diamonds dart their brightest lustre From the palsy-shaken head."
Landor.—I have never professed friendship for him.
North.—You have professed something more, then. Let me read a short poem to you, or at least a portion of it. It is an "Ode to Wordsworth."
"O WORDSWORTH! That other men should work for me In the rich mines of poesy, Pleases me better than the toil Of smoothing, under harden'd hand, With attic emery and oil, The shining point for wisdom's wand, Like those THOU temperest 'mid the rills Descending from thy native hills. He who would build his fame up high, The rule and plummet must apply, Nor say—I'll do what I have plann'd, Before he try if loam or sand Be still remaining in the place Delved for each polish'd pillar's base. With skilful eye and fit device THOU raisest every edifice: Whether in shelter'd vale it stand, Or overlook the Dardan strand, Amid those cypresses that mourn Laodamia's love forlorn."
Four of the brightest intellects that ever adorned any age or country. are then named, and a fifth who, though not equal to the least of them, is not unworthy of their company; and what follows?
"I wish them every joy above That highly blessÈd spirits prove, Save one, and that too shall be theirs, But after many rolling years, WHEN 'MID THEIR LIGHT THY LIGHT APPEARS."
Here are Chaucer, Shakspeare, Milton, Spenser, Dryden too, all in bliss above, yet not to be perfectly blest till the arrival of Wordsworth among them! Who wrote that, Mr. Landor? [123]
[Footnote 123: Whom Mr. L., who is the most capricious as well as the most arrogant of censors, sometimes takes into favour.]
Landor.—I did, Mr. North.
North.—Sir, I accept your article. It shall be published in Blackwood's Magazine. Good-morning, sir.
Landor.—Good-day, sir. Let me request your particular attention to the correction of the press. (Landor retires.)
North.—He is gone! Incomparable Savage! I cannot more effectually retaliate upon him for all his invectives against us than by admitting his gossiping trash into the Magazine. No part of the dialogue will be mistaken for Southey's; nor even for Porson's inspirations from the brandy-bottle.
All the honour due to the author will be exclusively Mr. Walter Savage Landor's; and, as it is certainly "not worth five shillings," no one will think it "worth borrowing or putting on."
