It was only in his art that he stood consciously aloof from his contemporaries, owing nothing, as he rightly boasted, to any man or school of them all. Nor was he the founder of a school, though even his earliest work contains a sure presage of the greatest Victorian poetry, and all later poets have been subtly in his debt. His influence exerted itself upon the method rather than upon the manner of their work. English verse gained from him a new sense of chastity and proportion, not as a desired quality, to "the gallery" by the exaggeration of what he believed himself to feel. A very little perfume will go a long way in soap. Of course one cannot get rid of Byron in any such summary way; but the real power in him was obscured by the very quality which made him popular; so much at least is true. The fashionable improvisatore was understood to be beyond the common law; his work is unconscious of the "bounding line" in thought or expression; and it has not stood. Landor had Byron's habit of producing his verse at a heat, and of giv-imported direct from the Mediterraing it little or no revision, but a glance is enough to show how different the product of rapid workmanship is from the product of improvisation. But, one perhaps thinks, Landor has so little human interest. What a picture of English society lies open in Byron's verse. Here was a man who knew the age in which he lived, and consequently left his mark upon it. As a matter of fact, Landor, too, was absorbingly interested in the life about him, an eager radical, ready to see the world move forward, and to help it as far as he could. His youthful mind was deeply stirred, as all noble minds were, by the liberty and equality propaganda; and not merely to opinion, as his personal enlistment in the Spanish cause presently showed. Nor was his interest in the problem of the hour less intense in later life. All this zest in practical matters finds outlet in his prose; he had other uses for his verse, though none in the least remote from human interest. For the greatest human interests are beyond those which are born of emergency or fashion, and it is these interests above all others which the poet is bound to interpret for us. Some deep concerns of life left Landor unmoved, as we have seen. He has the unmorality of the healthy pagan. He lacks the subdued religious fervor which gives its tone, for better or worse, to the poetry of Christendom; but he knew his own heart, and it was greater than most. NO. 537. 9 VOL. XC. nean or filtered through this or that It is almost a pity to have connected the word trifle with his shorter lyrics, for only what is imperfect is trifling in art, and in these poems Landor's art has attained its pure perfection. The opinion is common that his real power lay in the direction of the drama: I think it mainly lyrical. His plays are not mere Eschylean elaborations in dialogue of lyrical motives; nor are they root-bound by the utter subjectivity of Byron. But they are barren of action, and of rapid dramatic speech. Above all, they lack the passionate interplay of circumstance and temperament, the infinitely varied illumination of character, which mark the creative drama. Landor does not create, he discerns. Human nature he knew in the large, because he knew himself. He knew, too, certain striking types of character, the scholar, the priest, the libertine, the king, the woman; but he could not differentiate them, as examples of the same general type are given distinct personalities by Shakespeare or Miss Austen. His characters speak according to his opinion of what such characters would say rather than of their own accord, because they are what they are. The Imaginary Conversations are properly named; only two or three of them have even the semblance of dramatic dialogue. Yet to make one's characters speak according to one's opinion of what they would say still leaves much leeway for excellence. If Landor lacks the power to create persons, to set the breath of life in motion and let flesh and blood take care of itself and its own, he possesses a faculty of only secondary value to the poet. He is able to divine the significance of types, and to give them humanity, if not personality. His persons are as much more concrete than Ben Jonson's as they are less convincing than Shakespeare's. In short, he carries the objective process as far as it will go; that he came so near dramatic achievement is due to the fact that he was not merely intellectually, but sympathetically objective. Very early in life he conceived an ambition to express himself in the more formal and sustained poetic modes, which resulted in those two superb efforts of his 'prentice hand, Gebir and Count Julian. One might be inclined to say of such work that it fulfills its own promise. In its merely technical aspect it was very remarkable; there had been no such blank verse written since Milton. But the public was deaf to that sounding music, and the poet, independent as he professed himself, rather than be ignored, gave up an effort in which mere hostility might have confirmed him. "I confess to you," he said quietly, many years after, "if even foolish men had read Gebir, I should have continued to write poetry; there is something of summer in the hum of insects." But it is easily possible to exaggerate the world's loss from his failure to develop a faculty for formal epic and dramatic composition. Baffled by the silence with which his first great bursts of song were met, the poet must still be in some manner expressing himself. Noble as are those majestic tours de force, we can hardly doubt that he found a more fitting utterance in the less pretentious lyrical forms in which his genius took refuge. If he can no longer dream of rearing massy shafts to the level of cloud-capped Ilium, or sounding the depths of passionate experience, there are still the delicate flowers of human sentiment, over which he may lean and smile a moment as he passes. He has not torn them from their root in his heart; let the world do with them what it will. * The world has done very little with them, as it did very little with that other poetry of his. Why should one halt in the sober journey of life to dwell upon a mere prettiness of four or a dozen lines like Dirce or Rose Aylmer? What if it is perfect in its way, so is the symbol for nothing. A half thought, a dainty sentiment tricked in graceful verse, how is the conscientious student of literature to find a criticism of life in such poetry as this? Now and then the question strikes home upon some honest Landorian, and a table of the master's solid excellences is produced, to the confusion of his critics, and of the question in point. For the lover of Landor sometimes fails to see the superior value of his lighter work. He is praised for his dignity rather than for his grace, for his vigor of conception rather than for his delicate humanness of feeling. Yet grace and sympathy, not gravity and force, constitute the main charm of his verse. As the poet of refined sentiment Landor stands quite alone in English; that, it seems to me, is his distinction. It is not at all the popular sort of sentiment; its serenity and subtlety are doubtless irritating to the patron of literary vaudeville. You are not in the least danger of laughing one moment and crying the next; humor and sentiment are not set off against each other, they simply have no separate existence. It is an inner quality which quite as distinctly as his outward manner marks Landor's kinship with the poets of the old world. Yet no poetry has been written which is more free from the taint of the lamp. He was a Greek in nothing more truly than in his daily dependence upon the spiritual elbow-room of field and sky. He was in the habit of composing out of doors. His atmosphere is always quietly in motion. Love of nature was a trait of his, not a virtue. He has nothing of the mystical worshiping attitude which Wordsworth and his disciples have imposed upon us almost as a duty. He breathed freer in the open, that was all. A wild flower was more to him than a mountain peak. The daily round may do very well without grandeur, but hardly without its objects of chivalry and affection. And upon human nature, accordingly, he looks with tenderness rather than with the passionate yearning of romantic poets. The world has its tragedies, but there are many pleasant things in it for a healthy man to take delight in. The shorter lyrics of Landor, then, constitute a poetry of urbanity, a sort of sublimated vers de société. With all the elegance and good-breeding in the world, it is never artificial; the smirk of the courtier is never to be detected under the singer's wreath. It is urbane, but least of all urban. It deals unostentatiously with the kindlier human sentiments: personal affection for places, employments, living things; friendship without its exactions, hope without suspense, memory without bitterness; love without its reactions and reverses. It belongs to the healthy life which is aware of conditions rather than problems. In certain buoyant and full-blooded moods, the mysteries of existence do not trouble one; there is a straight road to every thing. Doubt of one's self or the world is a sort of treason, sorrow and suffering are morbid affections of the brain. Any extravagant feeling seems hysterical, even extravagant joy. The body is active, the mind ruminates, quietly conscious of every-day relations and experiences. This golden mood is habitual with Landor, and it is this mood to which he gives utterance in poetry not less rich because it is confined for the most part to the middle register. The quality of his work in this vein is nowhere better illustrated than in his poetic treatment of a single cherished sentiment, the tenderness of a strong man for womanhood. For flowers and for women he had the same fondness, touched sometimes with humor, but never with hard analysis; he was not a botanist nor an anatomist. In an early letter to Southey he owns a weakness for the study of feminine character, and it must have been very early that he gained the perception of a real type of womanhood to which he is never tired of paying tribute. It would be absurd to think of laying the finger upon this or that feminine creature of Shakespeare's and saying, "This is the woman of Shakespeare." The woman of Landor, on the contrary, is as distinct a type as - to compare great things with small — the Du Maurier woman. She is, like most of Shakespeare's heroines, in the first blossoming of youth and grace. Her delicate purity, her little petulances, her womanish lights and shadows of mood and mind, arouse in the poet an infinite delight. He has the reverence of a lover for her subtle charm, and a goodhumored cousinly indulgence for her foibles., The feeling of his Epicurus for Ternissa, or of his Æsop for Rhodope, leaves nothing to regret for those of us who think none the less of human life because it does not habitually wear the buskin. Brutus's Portia or the mother of the Gracchi Landor may admire; but his little Ianthe stands for the sex in his eyes. "God forbid that I should ever be drowned in any of these butts of malmsey!" he said of Oriental poetry. "It is better to describe a girl getting a tumble over a skipping-rope made of a wreath of flowers." Here and there throughout the varied volume of his work this dainty creature is continually making her exits and her entrances. The nymph in Gebir embodies her human self: — "She smiled, and more of pleasure than disdain Was in her dimpled chin and liberal lip, "Pyrrha! your tears are short sweet rain That glimmering on the flower-lit plain Zephyrs kiss back to heaven again. "Pyrrha! both anguish me: do please "Fair maiden, when I look at thee, And eyes that languisht, lengthening, just like Sometimes, too, he touches a deeper string, though still without overstepping the bound between sentiment and passion : 66 Artemia, while Orion sighs, "Wait, or you shall not have the kiss,' Says she; but he, on wing to pleasure, 'Are there not other hours for leisure ? For love is any hour like this?' 66 Artemia, faintly thou respondest, Ianthe in absence still gives color to his mood: "Only two months since you stood here! Two shortest months! then tell me why Voices are harsher than they were, And tears are longer ere they dry?" Or, with a more characteristic lightness of touch, he is uttering one of the finest things ever said by man to absent maid: "Summer has doft his latest green, And Autumn ranged the barley-mows. So long away then have you been? And are you coming back to close The year? it sadly wants repose." She is real to him; though delicately idealized, not conventionalized, as is often true of the darlings of the lighter muse. Not less remarkable than this sureness of conception is the perfection of the medium employed; its simple diction, its subtle variations of rhythm, giving even to the baldest of verse forms, the quatrain in ballad metre, a high dis tinction; its elusive power of suggestion; the curious fillip to fancy and feeling often given in the final verse. One does not feel that there has been a process of adjustment between thought and expression; neither could exist without the other. Who can really conceive a mute inglorious Landor- or Milton? But we may avoid a nearer approach to that Serbonian bog, the question of style. Landor's light verse is society verse without the exclusions of caste, occasional verse without its mouthing and ornamentation; a pure type of lyrical comedy. Such poetry has its serious uses. Delicacy of sentiment and austerity of form may well command THE COLUMBIA STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE.1 "THE criticism which alone can much help us for the future," wrote Mr. Arnold in his luciferous manner, "is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result." It is the hope of attaining such constructive thought as this, which, in a day when the artfully phrased gustation of bookish flavors too often passes under the name of criticism, can best justify single-minded devotion to the tenth Muse. To many it is a pleasure to observe how the saner manifestations of 1 A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. With special reference to the influence of Italy in the formation and direction of modern classicism. By JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN. New York: The Columbia University Press. The Macmillan Co. 1899. Spanish Literature in the England of the Tudors. By JOHN GARRETT UNDERHILL. New York: The Columbia University Press. The Macmillan Co. 1899. Romances of Roguery. An episode in the history of the novel. By FRANK WADLEIGH the study of comparative literature are tending to the realization of this ideal. The name comparative literature may be new, but the thing is old. In its best contemporary form it is quite in the genial English tradition of humane scholarship. Bacon's Advancement of Learning was perhaps its first important document, and, despite the alleged insularity of English taste, it has nowhere been more finely exhibited than in the work of such scholars as Bowles, Southey, Hallam, and Pater, or in that of their American cousins, Ticknor and Lowell. It has, indeed, been advanced by influences |
