30 January: Boreham on Walter Landor

An Explosive Genius
An hour with Walter Savage Landor, whose birthday is marked today, is like a visit to the zoo. It is highly entertaining and instructive, but you come away with a vivid memory of gleaming fangs and ominous growls. Living to be nearly 90, he spent most of his time in singing like an archangel and fuming like a fiend. It is difficult to discover the name of one individual among his kinsfolk and acquaintances with whom, at some time, if not at all times, he did not violently quarrel. He looked superbly leonine. His head was said to have been the most magnificent that Italian painters and sculptors had ever seen, but when they begged him to sit for them he shook his glorious locks impatiently and, with a sniff of fine disdain, pursued his royal way. His second name was prophetically inspired, for with great kindness of heart he mingled barbaric ferocity and an abominable temper.

Among the authentic records is the story of a certain day on which, as he sat at table, he noticed that the joint had been ruined in the kitchen. Waxing furious, he sent for the cook and threw open the window. On the arrival of the culprit, to the amazement of the household, he hurled from the casement, not the ill-prepared sirloin but the terrified offender. He afterwards expressed sorrow, not at having hazarded the limbs and the life of the unhappy cook, but at having made a frightful mess of the seedlings in the flower beds! Yet some of the most masterly English ever given to the world bears his name. He was a born artist. The craftsmanship of letters was to him an almost sacred thing. From his earliest boyhood he cherished an exalted ideal as to how a sentence should be turned. No painter ever approached his easel animated by a purer zest for the expression of beauty on canvas than Landor felt when he set himself to the construction of a paragraph or a poem.

Content With Nothing Short Of Perfection
Not only had he something to say—a generous flow of intellectual inspiration—but he was determined to make the articulation of his soul as accurate and as tuneful as the limitations of language would permit. To use one word more than was absolutely necessary would have been to him the unpardonable sin but it was of even greater importance that each word selected should be the most impressive and the most sweet-sounding and the best language was to him what melody is to the composer, what colour is to the painter. Any misuse or abuse of it would be a kind of sacrilege. And the extraordinary thing is that, conceiving these exalted ideas as a schoolboy, he held true to them through a literary career that lasted for nearly 70 years. From the penning of his first poems in 1794 until he laid aside his pen in 1863, he did not once waver in his clear vision of what English prose and English poetry should be.

As soon as he set to work—and he was only 20 when his first work was published—it became clear that a genius of the purest and most dazzling type had appeared on the horizon of English letters. Southey, going into transports of delight over Landor's earliest ventures, eagerly sought his friendship, while in the year in which Nelson perished so gloriously at Trafalgar the boy Shelley used to march up and down the playgrounds of Eton declaiming the stately periods of Landor at the top of his voice. To such minds Landor's work made a resistless appeal. Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas de Quincey, and, at a later date, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Carlyle all fell under the wand of the magician. Each in turn saluted Landor as an oracle. The pity of it is that his vogue was almost exclusively confined to such master minds. Sidney Colvin opens his monograph on Landor by declaring that few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little, as did he. It is a striking claim and a striking confession, revealing both the triumph and the tragedy of Landor.

Victimised By Variegated Enthusiasms
Like most fiery and impulsive natures, Landor was a man of overwhelming enthusiasms, and the wonder is not that he outgrew some of them but that he remained loyal to so many of them for so long. As a boy in his teens he was swept off his feet by a pretty Irish girl, Sophia Jane Swift, afterwards the Countess de Molande. It was purely a boy and girl infatuation, and neither of them took it seriously. She was known as Jane Landor, with poetic magic, transformed this into Ianthe. As Ianthe he embalmed her beauty in his poems. And though their lives were lived apart, and though he was nearly 80 when he heard of her death, he penned another poem in which he celebrated his delight that not all the oceans of the world could wash out his numerous tributes to her girlish loveliness. Unfortunately, his passionate enthusiasm did not always issue quite as pleasantly. He was 36 when, at a ball at Bath, he caught sight of Julia Thuillier—"a glorious creature with wonderful golden hair." "By heaven," he exclaimed, before he had even spoken to her, "I'll marry her!" And he did, almost immediately, but it ended miserably, as it was bound to do.

Another of his stormy impulses sent him rushing off to the Peninsula, to fight under the Duke against Napoleon, at the head of a regiment that he had himself recruited and financed. But, in war as in love, he was a blunderer, and the thing was a fiasco. Yet, while these incidental and subsidiary enthusiasms petered out, the supreme enthusiasm of his life, his passion for pure English, waxed rather than waned with the years. As a result he won for himself, as Swinburne puts it, such a double crown of glory, in verse and in prose, as has been won by no other Englishman but Milton. Landor sleeps under the cypresses in the picturesque little cemetery just outside the walls of Florence. Hard by are the tombs of Arthur Hugh Clough, Theodore Parker, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and, leaving him in such excellent company, we gratefully salute him.

F W Boreham

Image: Walter Savage Landor