No More Learning

Barton, on his side, owed Lamb a debt of gratitude for the advice
to keep to his profession instead of devoting himself to literature.
Of the two men, Barton was thirteen years the younger; occasion-
ally shocked at his mercurial correspondent's wit, he was evidently
receptive-a fact we should hardly infer from his poetry-
to Lamb's jests and puns; and Lamb wrote to him with a gusto
which would have been impossible had he been scattering his
treasures fruitlessly. The short memoir of Barton by his neigh-
bour and son-in-law, Edward FitzGerald, does full justice to his
quiet, unostentatious character, his sound judgment and the sin-
cerity of his verse.
Another correspondent of this period was Thomas Allsop, whose
long life was spent in the service of an extreme type of radicalism.
In the society of men like Allsop, Hazlitt and Hunt, Lamb's wide
tolerance led him to condone what his strong practical sense may
have condemned. For the radical poets, he had little liking. He
met Shelley once and found his voice ‘the most obnoxious squeak
I ever was tormented with,' and his reflections on Shelley's death,
in a hastily written letter to Barron Field, might have been those
of one whom the poet's atheism had blinded to his genius. While
he enjoyed The Vision of Judgment and was angry at the trouble
into which Hunt was brought by its publication, he confessed that
Byron
was to me offensive, and I never can make out his great power, which his
admirers talk of. . . . He was at best a Satyrist-in any other way he was mean
enough. I daresay I do him injustice; but I cannot love him, nor squeeze
a tear to his memory.
His association, however, with radicals and free-thinkers was one
cause of an expostulation by Southey, who, in 1823, remonstrated
in The Quarterly with Elia upon the irreligious tone of certain
passages in his work and referred incidentally to Hazlitt and Hunt,
the bugbears of the conservative review. In The London Maga-
zine for October, Elia responded with a long letter to his critic, in
which he exposed his wounded feelings and defended the character
of his friends. This letter is a vigorous piece of sustained prose
but the dignity of its tone is injured by its personal references
to Southey. The laureate, however, was slow to take offence,
and his answer to Lamb in a forbearing letter cleared up the


## p. 200 (#224) ############################################

200
[CH.
Lamb
6
misunderstanding. When The Last Essays of Elia was published,
only the concluding portion of the letter was printed.
This episode is one sign of the change which came over Lamb
during the last decade of his life. He was approaching his fiftieth
year. Through the greater part of 1824, he suffered from depres-
sion and nervous weakness, which led him to refer to himself as
Tremulus or Tremebundus. His interest in The London Magazine
began to decline. His daily work became irksome to him, and, on
29 March 1825, he came home for ever' from the India house, 'a
freed man. ' Out of a pension of £450, £9 a year was kept back as
a provision for Mary in case of her survival. The relief and
strangeness of his freedom were described in The Superannuated
Man. 'Mary,' he wrote to Wordsworth, ‘wakes every morning
with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us. ' To
one 'in wasted health and sore spirits,' this ‘Hegira, or Flight
from Leadenhall' was, at first, an unmixed blessing; but the
enforced idleness which it produced was the cause of much mental
unhappiness in Lamb's closing years. It was succeeded, in the
summer of 1825, by a nervous fever, which afforded a subject for
the essay called The Convalescent. In company with Allsop and
his wife, the Lambs went into lodgings at Enfield during July
and August. On his return to Islington, he was again ill, and
Mary's reason succumbed to the strain. Nevertheless, 1825 was
a productive year, and 1826 saw the appearance of Popular
Fallacies, which contains some of Lamb's most ingenious, if more
artificial, writing. In 1826, he was complaining of his health; his
head was 'a ringing Chaos,' and it is evident that he had fears for
his sanity. His connection with The London Magazine had
ceased in 1825, and, in September 1826, he wrote to Barton that
he had 'forsworn periodicals,' in some annoyance at Henry Col-
burn's dilatory treatment of his contributions to The New Monthly
Magazine. He found some occupation in reading the Garrick
plays at the British museum from ten to four daily : the extracts
which he made from them were printed in Hone's Table Book
throughout 1827.
One consolation of these chequered years was the presence in
their house of Emma Isola, the orphan daughter of Charles Isola,
one of the esquire bedells of the university of Cambridge. They
met her during one of their visits to a Cambridge friend, Mrs Paris;
she came to them during her holidays from school, and was
eventually adopted by them. In 1833, she married Edward
Moxon the publisher. Meanwhile, in September 1827, Lamb,


## p. 201 (#225) ############################################

VIII]
201
His Later Life
6
who had found a welcome refuge from Islington in his summer
visits to Enfield, took a house at Enfield known as Chase side, the
snuggest, most comfortable house, with every thing most compact
and desirable. ' He found delight in the neighbourhood of his
favourite Hertfordshire and in correspondence with, and occasional
visits from, his friends. Bryan Waller Procter, George Darley,
Talfourd, Vincent Novello and Henry Crabb Robinson are among
those who shared his intimacy at this time, with Walter Wilson,
the biographer of Defoe, and others with whom his friendship had
ripened during his later residence in London. Occasionally, he
went to London to draw his pension. Once, he dined at Talfourd's
to meet Wordsworth, always his idol among contemporary poets.
He brought home old books, including the works of Aquinas,
which he lent to Coleridge in his retirement at Highgate. For
some time, Mary had been able to remain at home during her
long illnesses, but, for Lamb, these were periods of enforced
solitude. In the summer of 1829, he was obliged to send her to
Fulham, and he felt lonely and out of spirits. His pity was always
for her; of himself, he seldom spoke without a touch of humour
to relieve his melancholy. But his anxieties led him, in 1829, to
seek lodgings with his neighbours, the Westwoods, 'the Baucis
and Baucida of dull Enfield. Thomas Westwood was a retired
haberdasher, a person of some consequence in Enfield, who sang
sea-songs at threescore-and-ten and had a single anecdote. With
this worthy man, the Lambs remained till May 1833. Their cares,
in 1830, were increased by the illness of Emma Isola, at Bury St
Edmunds. Lamb, on her recovery, fetched her home; and it was
on this journey that he escaped from the conversation of a well-
inform'd man,' by answering his question, 'What sort of a crop of
turnips do you think we shall have this year? ' with the delightful
retort, “It depends, I believe, upon boiled legs of mutton. The
alternation between high spirits and despair at Mary's 'deplorable
state' is painfully marked in the letters of this period. West-
wood's house became, to him, 'a house of pest and age,' and, with
the approaching marriage of Emma to Moxon, the situation
became unbearable. In May 1833, he made his final move to a
cottage in Church street, Edmonton, where a couple named
Walden, who took in mental patients, arranged to lodge and board
the brother and sister exclusively.
The best of Lamb's prose work written at Enfield appeared, in
1833, in the second volume of Elia, which Moxon published. In
June 1830, the same publisher had brought out a small volume of
6


## p. 202 (#226) ############################################

202
[CH.
Lamb
6
his fugitive verse under the title Album Verses. Instinctive delicacy
of workmanship, sincere pathos and pure and artless emotion, give
Lamb a unique place among those poets who, in occasional verse of
an unpretentious order, offer, from time to time, a clear and unruffled
reflection of the light that never was on sea and land. ' Alone of
his lyrics, The Old Familiar Faces, written under severe emotional
stress, is immortal; but Album Verses contains a number of
sonnets and simple lyrics whose charm, less compelling than the
poetic prose of Dream-Children, nevertheless springs from the
same fount of reminiscence and consciousness of the mingled
pleasure and pain of mortal joys. His sense of poetic style reaches
a climax in the chiming and haunting lines of the sonnet The
Gipsy's Malison. Less "curiously and perversely elaborate,' to
use his own phrase, are the triplets In the Album of Lucy Barton
and In His Own Album, and the pieces in octosyllabic couplets, in
which he was indebted to Marvell and other seventeenth century
poets and happily imitated their natural fluency. It is a charac-
teristic of Lamb's humour that he could indulge in doggerel
without producing that sense of incongruity which is often the
fate of the lighter efforts of the great masters of poetry. Verses
like the famous Going or Gone do not rise from the merely formal
point of view above the plane of Keats's lines on Teignmouth or
Oxford ; but they are filled with pathos and a sense of the
irrevocable, and the union of laughter and tears, conspicuous in
Elia, is fully achieved in this simple piece of verse.
Lamb's letters from his retirement at Edmonton refer with
unabated interest to the chief alleviations of his lifebooks and
pictures. He tells Cary, the translator of Dante, that, with the
aid of his translation and Emma's knowledge of Italian, he and his
sister have read the Inferno. These studies were interrupted by
Emma's marriage in August 1833. On the evening of the wedding,
Mary was restored to her senses, “as if by an electrical stroke. '
This was merely temporary. Lamb was content to be with her.
When she is not violent, her rambling chat is better to me than the sense
and sanity of this world. Her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks out
occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind struggling with the billows
that have gone over it.
Meanwhile, his brotherly devotion had undermined his health,
and intemperance was overcoming his shattered nervous system.
On this point, it is impossible to dwell too leniently. Lamb's
habitual weakness was simply an incident in a life the key-note
of which was the abandonment of selfish ease for a path of
in sogul,


## p. 203 (#227) ############################################

VIII]
203
Summary
6
>
unusual difficulty, and it neither hardened his heart nor dimmed
his intellect. It is probable that the death of Coleridge, in July
1834, was a blow from which he never recovered. On 21 November,
he wrote in the album of a London bookseller his famous tribute
to the memory of his friend, the proof and touchstone of all my
cogitations. ' 'I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since,
I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit
haunts me. ' A month later, while out walking, he fell down and
cut his face; erysipelas ensued, and, on 29 December, he died.
Mary survived him for thirteen years; she died in 1847, and was
buried in the same grave with him in the churchyard at Edmonton.
To the mind which estimates an author by his capacity for
sustained masterpieces, the disconnected character of Lamb's
writings offers some contrast to their reputation. A bundle of
essays, a number of casual lyrics, one or two brief plays, a tale of
striking pathos, a few narratives and adaptations of old authors
for children and some critical notes on his favourite writers-
these constitute the sum of his work. It was an age in which the
journalist and essayist flourished, and the essays of Hazlitt contain
more solid critical work, while those of De Quincey are more
remarkable for their scholarship and for a highly-coloured
eloquence the splendour of which faults of taste cannot dim.
But, in play of fancy, in susceptibility to the varying shades of
human emotion, in a humour wbich reflects clearly the perpetual
irony of life, Lamb is without an equal. His essays, he wrote to
John Taylor, 'want no Preface : they are all Preface. A Preface
is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they do nothing else. '
Through them shines the spirit of the man, alive to the absurdities
of the world, tender to its sorrows, tolerant to its weaknesses.
He courts the friendship, not the veneration, of his readers: he
looks to them, not as disciples, but as fellow-men. By the candid
revelation of himself in his essays and letters, by the light which
they throw upon a union of heart and life between brother and
sister unexampled in literature, he has won the affection of count-
less readers, even of those who have little care for the beauties of
literary style. To all of these, the love and confidence which the
Lambs inspired among their friends is still a living thing, and they
can read with a sense of personal possession the touching words
which Coleridge, at the end of a friendship of fifty years, inscribed
in the margin of the poem written during a visit which they paid
to Stowey, 'Charles and Mary Lamb, dear to me as my heart, yea
as it were my heart. '
а
Lamin


## p. 204 (#228) ############################################

CHAPTER IX
THE LANDORS, LEIGH HUNT, DE QUINCEY
The three writers who form the main subject of this chapter
when regarded individually, may seem, at first sight, to have
extremely little in common, except their date, the unusual length
of time during which they were contemporaries and the closely
connected fact that they survived all the greater men, and most of
the smaller, of their own generation. But, when they come to be
considered more narrowly and from the standpoint of strictly
historical criticism, points of resemblance, or of that contrast which
is often almost as much of a bond as resemblance for the purposes
of such treatment, will rapidly emerge; and the advantage of
treating them otherwise than as by three entirely disjoined
articles in a dictionary will emerge likewise.
Two of them were ambidextrous in respect of the harmonies
of written speech-employing prose and verse with equal facility,
though not, in both cases, in equal measure. De Quincey was a
prose-writer only-at least, his verse is small in quantity and quite
unimportant in quality; though he had the weakness to hint? that,
an he would, he could have versed it with the best of them. But
he had another cross-connection with Landor (this time Leigh
Hunt stood out), that both were elaborate and deliberate writers
of the most ornate prose that English had known since the
seventeenth century. Leigh Hunt and De Quincey-again to
cross the ties—were both eminent examples of the man-of-letters-
of-all-work, who, arising in the late seventeenth, and earlier
eighteenth, century, had been promoted quite out of Grub street
early in the nineteenth. Landor’s circumstances, ill as he managed
them, precluded him from following this occupation of necessity;
and this was fortunate, for, otherwise, the cook whose legendary
body crushed the violet bed at Florence would have found more
hapless fellows in the persons of many editors on the harder couches
1 Autobiography, chap. VII (vol. xiv, p. 197 in the 16 vol. edn of 1862).


## p. 205 (#229) ############################################

CH. IX] Their Polygraphic Character
205
of Fleet street and Paternoster row. But, except in this ticklish
point, he had all the ethos of the polygraph. ' No special subject
shows itself as exercising obsession, or receiving preference, in the
vast exuberance of his Poems and Conversations and Miscel-
lanies, except a strong tendency towards that criticism which
is ever dominant, if not predominant, in the others. Even his
classicism is a thing more of manner than of subject; and, though
he shows it often in subject also, that is mainly because the one
is germane to the other. Now, this polygraphic tendency is an
essential characteristic of the new age.
Yet, further, though we may here enter on more disputable
matter, the three resemble each other in a characteristic difficult
to formulate without making the field of dispute larger than it
strictly should be. Although they all had talent-amounting,
in Landor certainly, in De Quincey arguably, in Hunt scarcely,
to genius-few critics accustomed to the taking of wide com-
parative views would put them in the first rank, absolutely, of
their contemporaries. The mention of the names of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, at once, if it does not
dwarf, lessens them, though, perhaps, some would deny this in the
case of Landor. Even Southey, who, no doubt, in many, if not most,
judgments is regarded as the dark star of the new pleiad, is, in
popular language, 'a bigger man’than Leigh Hunt or De Quincey,
though there may be individual things by De Quincey certainly,
by Hunt perhaps, which Southey could not have done. Even
Landor himself (who, be it remembered, though not much given to
modesty, thought Southey at least his own equal) becomes artificial,
academic, restricted to exquisite construction of sometimes rather
lifeless form, beside his friend. Yet, if still keeping an eye on
these general similarities and differences, we turn to more in-
dividual treatment, we shall find, if not primacy in them as wholes,
such accomplishment in particulars and such distinction as, in
some literatures, would make them actually supreme and, even
in ours, assure them minor supremacies in detail.
Biography, almost always unnecessary here, is, in this special
place, almost wholly negligible; and this is fortunate because, while
nothing really important happened to any of them, all three are
surrounded with a sort of anti-halo of gossip which it would be
most unprofitable to discuss. Whether Landor was wholly or only
partly Boythorn; whether Hunt was wholly, partly or not at all
Skimpole; whether the former's dignity was really dignified or
a mixture of the grandiose and the childish ; whether Hunt, again,


## p. 206 (#230) ############################################

206 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey [CH. .
was 'a noble fellow' or, at best, a good-natured Bohemian; whether
De Quincey was an acute observer merely or a venomous carper on
one side of his character, a deliberate mystifier or even falsifier
of fact or a person with a marvellous gift for translating reality
into romance on the other—these, and not a few more, are points
upon which it is impossible for us to dilate. The reader whose
curiosity is excited will find no difficulty, with the aid of the
bibliography, in satisfying, and, perhaps, satiating, himself with
accounts and discussions of the facts. He will also, one dare
say, discover, later if not sooner, that the discussion, in almost
every case, has very little to do with the literary appreciation
Tennis of the exceedingly voluminous bodies of work added by them
to English literature, which contain not a few instances of its
finest work, which, in some cases, have exercised remarkable
influence and which, though complete exploration of them is, in
some cases, not easy, will never be explored by any affectionate
and competent student of that literature without the discovery of
treasures such as a student will revisit again and again.
The lack of ease just glanced at requires, even with the assist-
ance of the bibliography itself, a few remarks. It exists least in
the case of Landor, though, even in his case, the fullest collection-
Forster's—is not quite complete and has not been for some time
past very easy to obtain. It appears, however, to include all that is
indispensable, though some additions recently made by Mr Stephen
Wheeler are almost of importance, and amply provided with
interest. With De Quincey, matters become, if not more recondite
(for some of Landor's work seems almost inaccessible in the original
editions), more complicated. To the completest edition of his
collected works, by the late professor Masson, at least seven
volumes of Miscellanea, printed since in different forms and
shapes, have to be added; while his eccentric habit of leaving
deposits of unpublished writing in his various abodes (some-
times merely lodgings) makes the discovery of yet more not
very unlikely.
But Leigh Hunt's is the worst case of all. No attempt even at
a complete edition has ever been made; and it may be doubted
whether the materials for one exist together in any library.
the whole were assembled it would probably make a collection of
works as large, at least, as that of Voltaire. For Hunt, though, as
has been said, a good deal of a Bohemian, had little or nothing of
the idleness ascribed to the citizens of the spiritual Prague; and,
if he had not the knack of managing or keeping money, was
If


## p. 207 (#231) ############################################

ix] Similarity of Landor's Prose and Verse 207
6
a
untiring in his efforts to earn it, though he does not seem, like
De Quincey, to have written for the sake of writing, whether
hunger and request of friends' pressed or not.
But these inconveniences, though they exist, are not really so
important as they may appear. In all three cases, the additions
made from time to time to what may be called the working
textus receptus have thrown very little new light on the general
literary character of the authors; and that character, in two cases
(Landor's and De Quincey's), is so clearly and deeply stamped,
in the other (Leigh Hunt's) diffused in a manner so light but
pervading and fully perceptible, that even the most bountiful
'windfall of the muses' possible now, though it might give
additional pleasure, would hardly give new pleasure and would
pretty certainly add nothing to our critical instruction. Let us,
therefore, take them in order, directing the main survey on the
individuals so as to prevent dispersion and confusion of view,
but utilising whatever lights of community and comparison may
present themselves.
The two points which a careful student of Landor will soon
discover for himself, are that singular ambidexterity in verse
and prose already referred to, possessed by him in measure
and manner utterly different from the fashion and degree in
which it was possessed by Hunt, and, secondly, the equally
unparalleled but much stranger fashion in which classic' and
romantic' tendencies and characteristics were combined in him.
Until these two points are independently reached by the student,
or unless he consents to take them on trust till he has confirmed
them by his own study, there is constant danger of misapprehension;
and from that misapprehension some enthusiastic and otherwise
valuable studies of him have not been free. The two propositions
themselves require careful handling. Landor has been already
contrasted with Hunt as to the special character of their joint
addiction to prose and verse; but, in this particular respect, they
are too far asunder for contrast to be anything but a contrast.
Except a certain easy fluency which sometimes runs close to the
undistinguished, if not to the distinctly slipshod, there is not much
kinship between Hunt's style in prose and his style in verse. In
some other poets who have also been great prose-writers there
might even be said to have been a broad difference between their
verse and their prose style, such as may be found in instances so
different in themselves as Dryden and Matthew Arnold. Moreover,
the styles and dictions of verse and prose have always, in English,
6


## p. 208 (#232) ############################################

208 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
a
been strongly contrasted; it is the case even in a writer like Words-
worth, who held theories adverse to such a contrast. But Landor's
prose and Landor's verse are so strangely allied that there is
practically nothing save the presence or absence of metre which
distinguishes them, though, reversing the usual practice with his
usual self-will, the prose diction and the prose imagery are some-
times more 'flowery and starry' than those of the verse. This is
a real idiosyncrasy; and it can hardly be matched except in a
language and literature which, oddly enough, Landor detested
above all others-in French. And, even there—even in Voltaire
and Victor Hugo, great as the likeness of their prose and their
verse is in each of two cases which differ much from each other
—the identity of the two manners is not so great as in Landor.
He stands almost, but not quite, equally alone in his strange
compound (for it is a real chemical compound, not a mere mechanical
mixture) of classic and romantic. The names of Spenser, Milton,
Gray, Matthew Arnold again and Swinburne, may rise to some lips
by way of objection; but, in all cases, when they are examined,
the elements will be found more separate than in Landor.
He
would himself probably have disliked—have, indeed, disclaimed, in
his most Boythornian vein—any sympathy with romanticism. He
boasted his indifference to Spenser himself; of his own contem-
poraries, he preferred Southey, who, in some ways, though not in
all, was the least romantic of them. But it is what a man does, not
what he says, that, in the higher courts of criticism, ‘may be used
against him. ' That Landor's scholarship, except as regards his
remarkable faculty of writing Latin verse, was not very deep or
very wide, has long been known. Despite his fondness for Greek
subjects, and the magical air of Hellenic quality which he has
managed to throw over his treatment of them, it is admitted that,
at one time, he was rather ignorant of Greek literature, and at no
time thoroughly familiar with it, though he caught a good deal of
it through Latin, with which he was thoroughly familiar, and of
which some acute judges have found more real flavour in him than
of Greek. But the important point for us at the moment is that,
wold he nold he, this assumption of a classical garb, the selec-
tion of classical subjects, even this attempt to create and to diffuse
a classical atmosphere, were all subtly conditioned by an under-
lying romantic influence which was of the age as well as of the
man and which he could not resist. Except in a few of what may
be justly called his epigrams, in the proper original sense, he never
shows classical restraint in expression-even his avowed efforts to


## p. 209 (#233) ############################################

IX]
209
Landor's Classicism
romancers.
unload' and 'cut out' frequently result in an obscure concentration
and compression of beauties' rather than in classical conciseness
and perspicuity combined. It is impossible to imagine anything
more inconsistent with even the laxest classical conception of an
epic than Gebir or any less Aristotelian drama than Count Julian.
The only classical form which Imaginary Conversations, whether
in verse or prose, suggest, is that ambiguous and, unfortunately,
only in small part extant department the mime; while the elaborate
and beautiful descriptions in prose recall only the very late and,
to some extent, degenerate ecphrasest of Greek rhetoricians and
The famous lines of Swinburne,
And through the trumpet of a child of Rome
Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece,
are absolutely critical as regards the Romanising of the Hellenic in
Landor; but exception might be taken, in no cavilling spirit, to
the epithet ‘pure. ' The music was singularly blended—a mixed
mode of Greek and Roman and modern—and though, perhaps, the
musician's efforts were always or often consciously directed towards
keeping down the modern element, he frequently failed, and some-
times, when he came nearest to success, succeeded only in artifice
or variability. Still, as has been said, there is no one exactly like
him or even very near to him in this blended character; and its
results, at their happiest, were such as even English literature
could not afford to lose.
Although, to the general reader, Landor, if he is anything at all,
is a writer of prose, his poetical work deserves to be considered
first, for more reasons than that of the general priority of verse.
This, though, in later days, he affected to regard it as an amusement
only, was, to him, a life-long occupation; he only took to prose—he
certainly only published it-in middle and later age, and it may be
not ungenerously doubted whether despair of gaining the public ear
with verse did not induce in him a certain turning to the Gentiles'
with prose. Although the bulk of his verse is almost necessarily
less than that of his prose, it is very considerable; and may run,
at a rough guess, to between forty and fifty thousand lines. The
kinds of it are also sufficiently, if not extremely, various, ranging
from the already mentioned epic and closet-drama through dia-
logues of a less and less theatrically dramatic kind, idylls with
some conversation in them, and idylls purely narrative to an
immense multitude-hundreds and almost thousands of shorter
1 The &xopaors, or set description, is one of the most characteristic features of late
Greek work.
>
E. L. XII.
CH, IX.
14


## p. 210 (#234) ############################################

210 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
pieces; epigrams, sometimes in the modern, but nearly always in
the Greek, sense, of all lengths and in a variety of metres, though
Landor moulded his practice to his own mistaken theory of the
comparative poverty of English in this respect and seldom tried,
while he still more seldom succeeded in, anything which had not
an iambic or trochaic base.
The smallness of the audience which Gebir obtained at its first
appearance was celebrated in a fashion humourous, but, as was his
wont, rather over-laboured, by a contemporary and companion in
the present chapter. De Quincey pretended to pride himself upon
being “a mono-Gebirist,' meaning, thereby, not (as stricter analogy
would require) 'a reader of Gebir only' but 'the only reader of
Gebir. ' This, of course, was an exaggeration; but it is certain
that the poem was the very reverse of popular, though one very
beautiful conceit—the fancy about the sea-shell remembering and
repeating the music of the waves-found fairly early recognition
and has long been familiar to thousands who never read another
line of the poem. It contains, however, other passages as fine, or
even, except sentimentally, finer, such as the magnificent distich :
And the long moonbeam on the hard wet sand
Lay, like a jasper column half up-reared.
But this most classical of our poets has incurred the very curse
which a successor in classicism pronounced a modernity. Gebir
has numerous beautiful passages? , still more numerous beautiful
lines and phrases. But it is strangely destitute of interest either
of story or of character, and such action as it has is evolved neither
with epic nor with dramatic skill. The versification and the diction
both aim at a Miltonic stateliness and sometimes achieve it; but
there are false notes in the phrase, if not in the verse, of which
Milton never could have been guilty; and the verse itself has a
monotony which it is one of Milton's greatest triumphs to have
avoided. The most complimentary comparison that can be
borrowed from the other arts for it is that of a bas-relief, worked
with no small sculpturesque art, dignified in conception and
execution, even heightened, here and there, with gold and colours,
ony
1
1
.
1 He admitted that Southey had been another, but the only other, member of the
sect. It was characteristic of Landor himself, for all his affected preference for few
admirers, to be seriously nettled at De Quincey's joke.
2 The author, in his curious forfanterie, probably intended it to be supposed that
there were many more in the 'loads [he] carted off to give it proportion. Yet, to
Southey, to whom he 'showed off' less frequently than to most, he admitted that he
had • boiled away too much. '
6


## p. 211 (#235) ############################################

IX]
2 II
Landor's Dramas
but producing, on the whole, an effect lifeless, bloodless and
wanting in charm as well as, in parts, indistinct and confused.
Landor called the very large body of verse of dramatic form
which he published—a body filling nearly four hundred pages of
between forty and fifty lines each-Acts and Scenes, expressly
noting that ‘none of them were offered to the stage, being no
better than Imaginary Conversations in metre. ' There is, how-
ever, a very marked difference between the first, the already
mentioned Count Julian, and the rest of them. Count Julian is
,
not easily distinguishable from the dramas--of the closet kind,
but very frequently offered to the stage in Landor's time—which
are noticed in other parts of this work, such dramas as those even
of Coleridge and, still more, of Talfourd and Taylor, of Milman and
Darley.
Its acts are the regular five, its action is conducted in
the usual stage manner and its style and diction conform to the
somewhat artificial stateliness which, though discarding the worst
eighteenth century "stage lingo,' remained, and, to some extent,
still remains, the orthodox speech of tragedy. It is somewhat
less artificial in style than Gebir; and the enforced, though mini-
mised, action of a drama frees it, to a certain extent, from the
deadly-liveliness of the epic. But, on the whole, it reminds one, as
plays of its class often do, of Sainte-Beuve's polite but fatal
verdict on Don Garcie de Navarre, Molière's one effort in alien
kind. It is an essai pâle et noble; but little, if anything, more.
Being Landor's, it could not but contain some passages of fine
blank verse. But here, with, perhaps, one exception, it is far below
Gebir; while even the advantages of drama do not suffice to give it
real liveliness of action. The points of the situations are not taken;
the characters are not worked out and, by the strangest mistake
of all, “the tragic frailties,' the great secret in which Aristotle's
principles and Shakespeare's practice agree, Covilla's? disgrace
and Julian's treason are, as it were, 'previous questions'-over
and done before the play begins.
The fact simply is that the modern and romantic touch in
Landor made him unequal either to formal epic or to formal
drama. He wanted the loose movement, the more 'accidented'
1 Landor's name for Roderick's victim, usually called Florinda. It should be
noticed as a caution most necessary for readers that the chronological order of
Landor's Poems is very different from that of their places in Forster's edition. The
Neapolitan trilogy, for instance, now to be noticed, was written twenty-four years after
Count Julian. But Landor's competence in writing, if not in conduct, lasted unusually
late; and the maintenance of his literary powers is one of his numerous extraordinary
points.
14-2


## p. 212 (#236) ############################################

212 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
situations, the full, and sometimes almost irrelevant, talk, the
subsidiary interest of description and other things of the kind, to
enable him to be something more than 'pale and noble. ' In the
great bulk of Acts and Scenes, and especially in the long and
important one which comes next (in his Works, though not in time)
to Count Julian, Andrea of Hungary, as well as, though to a
slightly less degree, in its sequels, which complete the trilogy on
Giovanna of Naples, he has provided himself liberally with all
these things. The three pieces, which together extend to a
hundred and forty of the large pages above referred to, are much
more than 'imaginary conversations in metre'; they form, in fact,
a historical novel, thrown into conversational dramatic form with
all the redundances of the novel as they may seem from the
dramatic point of view. Sometimes, the treatment approaches
more nearly to the fashion of an actable play scene; sometimes, to
that of a chapter of Scott or Dumas turned into verse and put in
action instead of narration. And this hybrid character is main-
tained, almost continuously, in the pieces that follow: more than a
dozen in number, though always shorter, and sometimes much
shorter, than the Neapolitan set. The merits and defects of the
form, and its instances, as well as a still more interesting subject,
the relative merit of the prose and verse, will be better discussed
when we come to the prose itself. It may be enough to say here
that, in this new handling, Landor at last discovers the source of
that interest which he had failed to attain in Gebir and Count
Julian.
It may be matter for question whether this interest is equally
maintained in his more numerous but, both as individuals and in
the mass, less bulky Hellenics, of which there are some fifty, spread,
in point of composition, over a large part of his life. They were
above called idylls, and, according to Greek practice, they strictly
deserve the name. As such, they are entitled to use or disuse the
dramatic or, at least, the dialogic form at pleasure; and they avail
themselves of the privilege. Thus, one of the best known, Coresus
and Callirrhoe, is a continuous narrative; another, Menelaus and
Helen, has both dialogue and action.
There is no doubt, however, that, except to very peculiar, and,
perhaps, rather factitious, taste, there is something wanting in these
longer poetical works by Landor. They excite esteem very com-
monly, except when he tries humour or argument; satisfaction and
admiration, sometimes; transport, hardly ever save by occasional
flashes, mostly of mere description. It was, perhaps, much for
1
1


## p. 213 (#237) ############################################

IX]
213
Landor's Shorter Poems
a
Landor to condescend to the admission that his 'Cenci' scenes
do not challenge comparison with Shelley’s ‘noble tragedy’; but
the comparison forces itself all the more unfortunately, while the
preface in which it occurs closes with a piece of that miss-fire
irony of which Landor was unluckily prodigal. In reading Acts
and Scenes and Hellenics, one finds, and in re-reading them one
expects, hardly any jewels five words long. ' A few pieces of
the beautiful elaborate, but too often lifeless, description which
finds a better home in the prose occur ; but nothing (if it be not
rash to judge so positively of so wide a field) equal to the best
things in Gebir. The situations are often-in fact, usually—well
selected; the composition, both in the lower and the higher senses
of that word in different arts, is frequently admirable, the execu-
tion correct and creditable; but the total effect is too often cold?
It is not that Landor is by any means a stickler for what is
commonly called propriety. His situations are not seldom of the
luscious kind, and, though never guilty of coarseness, he is occa-
sionally chargeable with innuendo. But, in aiming at passion, he
too often only attains sentiment. The feeling may be there; in
some cases, it certainly is ; but it is too often birth-strangled in
the expression, partly by an attempt at classical restraint, which,
as pointed out above, is not really natural to the writer, and partly
by the singular verbosity also glanced at, which, in a way, is the
escapement' and compensation for this restraint. There are
comparatively few of Landor's longer pieces in which he does not,
as it were, hold overflow meetings—which he addresses partly
with repetitions and partly with ekings of what he has said before?
The advantage, to such a poet, of shorter and, in some cases,
definitely limited forms can hardly be over-estimated; and it is
enhanced not merely by that blend of classic and romantic which
has been noticed, but by a further blend-to some extent conse-
quential—of eighteenth and nineteenth century touch which is
more noticeable in Landor than in almost any of his companions.
They, for the most part—even Wordsworth, even Scott-grew out
of one strain into the other; Landor kept the mixture. He is
1 The very best of the exceptions is, perhaps, the beautiful and almost wellknown
Hamadryad, which is faultless throughout and contains one of Landor's very finest
single lines,
And the axe shone behind him in their eyes,
where picture, sound and hidden, as well as obvious, meaning are marvellously com-
bined.
2 In fact, to use his own words against him (see above p. 210, note 2), if, in Gebir, he had
boiled away too much,' he certainly, in some of these pieces, . boiled away too little. '


## p. 214 (#238) ############################################

214 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
thus able, in his best so-called epigrams and elsewhere, to observe
the neatness and clear outline of eighteenth century occasional
pieces, while suffusing it with the later colour and diffusing over it
the later atmosphere. A little piece, which comes quite early in
the collection of 1846 and which was probably written nearly
half a century earlier, for it is one of the Ianthe poems,
Pleasure, why thus desert the heart,
exhibits this combination remarkably; while it has much to do
with the extraordinary charm of the two little masterpieces Rose
Aylmer and Dirce. But, through all these mote-like poems
and poemlets, the total number of which comes not so very far
short of a thousand, though there may be triviality, false wit,
dulness and other faults here and there, there is always the chance
of coming across that flash and glow of the opal which Landor
has in a special manner and measure, which is the dearest of
delights to true lovers of poetry and over which he retained com-
mand, in these short pieces, almost to his death. Some, even of
these pieces, such as Gunlaug (an early attempt) and Guidone
and Lucia, may almost be called long, running to five hundred
lines or so; and there are numerous pages which only just, or do
not quite, suffice for a poem. But the scale runs down to single
couplets, even single lines, and a greater number of the con-
stituents does not exceed from half a score to a score of
lines. Here, the drawbacks of Landor's larger pieces, to a great
.
extent, disappear. A considerable number of these smaller pieces
are, of course, trivial; but their smallness makes the triviality at
once apparent, and they can be passed over without the dis-
appointed and disappointing labour which the conscientious reader
of a longer piece undergoes. The miniature jewels above referred
to, the larger but almost throughout admirable odes to Words-
worth and Southey, a positive majority of the Ianthe pieces
(which would deserve isolation in a separate but complete sheaf,
for they have a distinctive quality rare in the vast harvest of love
poetry), the Browning sonnet, still, perhaps, the best thing on its
subject and in its kind after seventy years, are all consummate;
and there are many to add. To the last, in Dry Sticks, he retained
that strange occasional command of perfect phrase which was his
special merit and privilege, and of which almost his greatest single
example is the famous
Beyond the arrows, views and shouts of men
in Count Julian.
Seldom or never on pages facing each other in the published work


## p. 215 (#239) ############################################

ix]
215
Imaginary Conversations
of a man between eighty and ninety can one find two such opposed
pieces as the admirable monostich of A Sensible Girl's Reply to
Moore's “ Our couch shall be roses all spangled with dew"
It would give me rheumatics: and so it would you
(the best joke as well as one of the last that he ever made), and the
contrast:
Ah Southey, how we stumble on through life
Among the broken images of dreams
Not one of them to be raised up again.
Yet it must have been later still, so far as the time of compo-
sition went, that he wrote Rose the Third and other beautiful
things. In fact, selections from Landor have not, perhaps, even yet
done full justice to his poetry; though there is hardly any poet
who requires selection so much.
It is, however, undoubtedly, as a writer of prose that Landor is
most generally known, so far as he can be said to be generally
known at all; and it was in prose that the most copious and indi-
vidual products of his genius were supplied even to his most
critical admirers. Imaginary Conversations did not begin to be
published" till he was past the middle of his unusually long life;
but he was untiring in the production of them to the very last,
and their bulk is very considerable indeed, especially if we include
Pericles and A spasia and The Pentameron of right and The Citation
and Examination of Shakespeare of grace. Their subjects are of
the most varied nature possible-ranging from Greek to actually
contemporary matters, and Landor, at least, endeavours to make
the treatments as various. It has been pointed out already that his
verse Acts and Scenes have much of the character of verse-novels,
and, in Imaginary Conversations, which include a good deal of
action as well as conversation, the absence of the restraints of verse
is accompanied naturally enough by a still wider expatiation in
both speech and incident. The result very often, if not always,
gives the same restoration of interest which has been already
noticed. Tragedy and comedy, history and imagination, scenery
and sentiment, all are made to come in, and, to enhance the
attraction, Landor endeavours, after a fashion which, indeed, had
been essayed by others, especially by De Quincey in Confessions
of an English Opium Eater, to throw over large parts of his work
1 He had tried something of the kind once or twice earlier; but the crystallising
touch' seems to have been given by a casual observation in one of Southey's letters as
to his own Colloquies.


## p. 216 (#240) ############################################

216 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
1
1
a charm of elaborate prose style emulating the most ambitious
efforts of the poet. In poetry itself, he had been almost rigidly
eighteenth century in form if not quite in diction. He had
actually deprecated, in his correspondence with Southey, the
adoption of any but familiar and consecrated metrical forms, not
merely as regarded exotic and archaic devices, classical metres,
and so forth, but even as concerned new stanza-combinations of
already recognised line-forms. But, in prose, he summoned to his
aid every device of rhythm, colour, word-value, sound-concert and
other helps that rhetoric and prosody itself, used in the most
general way, could give him. There was no longer, as in his
verse, any effort to 'boil away,' to 'cart off loads' of matter likely
to be attractive to the general: there was, on the other hand,
evident effort to 'let everything go in,' to 'load every rift with ore. '
The effect, from the point of view last suggested especially, was
a triumphant success, except in the eyes of those who, reversing
Landor's position, held, as to prose, the same views which he held
as to verse, and disliked lavish and gorgeous ornament in it.
More beautiful things—from the famous 'dreams' which some-
times fill pages, to the little phrases, clauses and passages which
occur constantly-are not to be found in literature, ancient or
modern, English or foreign. Some have gone so far as to insist
that there are none so beautiful ; a position which a critic whose
memory is fairly full and his judgment fairly catholic will be slow
to accept, and which is itself, perhaps, essentially uncritical. In
their own way, they are perfect, and that is enough.
When, however, we leave this charming quality of style, it is
not so easy to keep to the path of simple eulogy. There are few
more curious instances of difference of opinion in the history of
literary criticism, though it shows many such, than the varying
estimates of Landor's humour. There are those, sometimes men
of renown, who find it 'exquisite'; there are others, not perhaps
by any means very limited in their appreciation of this elusive but
important quality, who are seldom, if ever, able to enjoy it at all-
who think it, from The Citation and Examination of Shakespeare
down to the conversation entitled The Duke de Richelieu, Sir Fire-
brace Cotes, Lady G. and Mr Normanby, the most depressing ex-
hibition that ever a man of genius made of himself, to whom it seems
forced, trivial, at best schoolboyish, at worst almost, if not quite,
vulgar. Appreciation of his sentiment does not, perhaps, swing the
pendulum through so enormous an arc, but it occupies a sufficiently
wide one in its variety, as may be seen from the fact that what some
1


## p. 217 (#241) ############################################

IX]
217
Landor's Criticism
of his greatest admirers call 'girlish,' others, no less enthusiastic
on the whole, style 'missish,' a difference slight in word, formidable
in sense. Few, even of these partisans, have ranked his reason-
ing powers high, and still fewer, even of those who, in a way,
sympathise with him politically, have shown much eagerness to
accept him as a mouthpiece of their own political views. He
seems-and this is one of the legacies of the century of his birth,
to have spoken of religious and ecclesiastical matters without the
slightest real conception of what these matters mean; and, in his
miscellaneous utterances, especially on contemporary subjects,
there is a perpetual atmosphere of 'fling,' through which the
missiles dart and hurtle as if from a dozen different quarters at
once, with a result which recalls all attributes of chaos-noise,
darkness, confusion. The escapes from this--in themselves not
always quite continuous-provided by Pericles and Aspasia,
by the Boccaccio and Petrarca pieces, Euthymedes and, for-
tunately, not a few others, may, perhaps, acquire an additional
character of paradises from their association with this Tartarus or
Limbo; but the critical historical estimate can hardly neglect the
latter. There is probably no part of Landor's work, not even the
long poems, which has been less read than bis chiefly critical
miscellanies in prose; and, though the general reader, perhaps, is
not to be blamed for his neglect, the student will not pass them
by except to his great loss. It is true that nowhere does that
uncritical quality which accompanies Landor when he is most
critical more distinctly appear, whether it be in more general
matters, such as his spelling reform crotchet, or in direct comment
on individual books and authors. But, just as in Poems and
Conversations you are never without hope and seldom without
satisfaction of beauty, so, here, you need never despair of luminous
flashes of critical utterance. In short, you are driven to say that
while there is hardly in the whole of literature an author so
difficult to read through without constant dissatisfaction, so there
is none whom it is so necessary to read through in order to
judge him fairly and enjoy him intelligently.
The result of such a reading to those who look first to form
and expression can hardly but be satisfactory; to those who look
no further, if there be any such, few writers can be Landor's
rivals. But there is still another split of opinion between his
.
actual admirers as to the positive value of his matter. Some have
gone so far-while, of course, admitting the extreme unwisdom
of Landor's conduct—as to allow his literary work, when not


## p. 218 (#242) ############################################

218 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey [CH. .
expressive of mere irritation, crotchet, or prejudice, the supreme
merit of wisdom' itself. Some have called him a great thinker,
though a feeble reasoner in support of his thoughts ; and he has
actually been credited with having uttered more delicate
aphorisms of human nature than anyone except Shakespeare.
It is true that there may have been latent guile in the adjective
delicate,' covertly, though not openly, narrowing the compliment.
Yet, there is no doubt that high intellectual and moral value is
attributed to Landor by some. Others, prepared to go almost
the furthest lengths possible in admiration of his expression at
its best, find it impossible to rank him very high in these other
respects. They do not share the vulgar objection to the common-
place and obvious; they know that the greatest things in prose
and poetry alike are commonplaces on which the writer has thrown
(to use Coleridge's consummate image) the special moonlight or
sunlight of his own thought and treatment, thus differentiating
and subliming them. But this is what they rarely, if ever, find
in Landor. There is exquisite expression, but it is seldom more
than the expression, exquisite indeed, but without halo or aura,
of what may almost be called copy-book truths or drawing-book
pictures. He has scores of true, tender, touching, charming things
on death and love and youth and age on the one side, and, in
his sober moments, not a little commonsense on the other. He
has almost always at hand, if not actually present, perfection of
expression. But, for acuteness of practical intellect dividing joint
and marrow, and shattering fallacy, you will never find in him
anything like Johnson's 'You do not know, Sir, that he is guilty
till the judge has decided’; nor, for the disclosure of poetic
altitudes and abysses, will you find anything like
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,
or
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence.
Indeed, though Landor lived to receive the homage of Swinburne,
his schoolboy walks had taken him past the house where still
lingered the daughter of Addison; and, outrageous though the
statement may seem, there is still much in him which reminds
one more of Pope than of Shakespeare or Wordsworth.
It would be negligent in such a place as the present to take
no notice of some, at least, of the opinions which have existed
in reference to this remarkable writer. His own more than


## p. 219 (#243) ############################################

IX] History of Landor's Reputation
219
6
mmer
werd
sufficiently quoted remark (which is, perhaps, not subject to the
charge of mixed metaphor sometimes brought against it)' has not
been quite so exactly fulfilled as is also commonly said ; for, in his
sense, he ‘dined' very early, and the guests, though certainly few,
were as certainly select. From Southey's eulogies, which were,
however, often accompanied by judicious warnings, some deductions
must, no doubt, be made. They had entered too early into a quite
uncorrupt and very interesting but rather disabling mutual admi-
ration society of practically unlimited liability; and, with some
strong differences, there was too great a sympathy between them
for perfectly achromatic judgment. You and I,' said a very
distinguished man of letters of a later generation to one not quite
80 eminent, 'ought not to review each other. ' But Southey was
by no means Landor's only admirer, nor were Southey and
De Quincey alone in the condemnation above referred to;
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamb, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, with
whatever minor differences, joined in the admiration, and the only
first-rate dissident, whose dissent was chequered by not a little
eulogy, was the certainly unsurpassed but wayward and somewhat
incalculable spirit of Hazlitt. In the middle generation of the
nineteenth century ‘all the wits were there,' in the same sense,
from Tennyson and Browning, Carlyle and Dickens downwards.
Later still, the unmeasured laudation of Swinburne and the less
exuberant and unqualified but almost as high estimate of Sir Sidney
Colvin followed ; and there is no sign of much alteration in the
youngest opinion. For the vulgus never: for the clerus surely'
has been the almost hackneyed but well-justified summary. In
such cases, there is always a temptation either to join the chorus
or to take the equally easy but even less commendable line of
more or less paradoxical disparagement. In the foregoing estimate,
a strenuous endeavour, based on long acquaintance and frequently
revised impression, has been made to keep the difficult and
dangerous middle way of strict criticism.
The quality in Landor which repels, or, at least, fails to attract,
some readers, except from the side of pure form, was well, if
almost accidentally, pointed out by a critic hardly professional, at
least as regards English literature, but exceptionally scholarly, and
2
9
1•I shall dine late but the room will be well lighted and the guests few but select. '
? It is rather unfortunate that the complete correspondence between the two has
never been published. Forster supplied not a few of the lacunae in Cuthbert Southey's
and J. W. Warter's collections but left much out or gave it only in summary; and,
even had he been more liberal, the disjecta membra of the three storehouses would have
been hard to put together.


## p. 220 (#244) ############################################

220 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey [CH.
6
not in the least given to carping—the late Lewis Campbell, who
complained of his ‘aloofness and unreality. ' It is only in the apices
of his poetry, such as Rose Aylmer and in a few passages of his
prose, such as the purple passages of the 'dreams,' the scholar
episode of The Citation and Examination of Shakespeare and a
few others, where these peculiarities are overcome by genuine
passion? or, in one way or another, positively suit the subject, that
Landor escapes a certain artificiality. Another very happy phrase
of Campbell, applied to Landor's friend Dickens? , emphatically does
not apply, except on these rarest occasions, to Landor himself.
His characters are never exactly "human effluences,' they are
effluences of books and of a fantastic individual combination of
scholarly taste and wilful temperament. His aloofness is not the
poetic aloofness which Matthew Arnold adumbrates in the famous
passage of Resignation-a critical but, at the same time, sympa-
thetic contemplativeness—for, except in relation to literature, and
even largely as to that, he is nothing if not uncritical ; while even
his sympathies, which are often keen, are so twisted and tossed by
whims and crazes and crotchets of all kinds that they are never to
be depended on. That his humour is even more uncertain has
been said already. When any lover of style and form remembers
not merely his great show pieces but the smaller patches—the
stripes of purple,' as Quintilian would say, woven into all the prose,
and not sparingly scattered over the verse—he is apt to pronounce
Landor one of the mightiest of magicians; and so, at these times,
he is. But he is a Prospero with a most imperfect and intermittent
command over his Ariel, and, perhaps, always better suited to
uttermost isles of fancy than to the Milans of the actual world.
But, if Landor only occasionally escaped the charge of being
an insufficient Prospero, the title 'Ariel of criticism,' which has
actually been applied to Leigh Hunt, is far more unfortunate.
This excess of honour seems to have been suggested by a certain
lightness (which he undoubtedly possessed, but which is an
ambiguous term) and by his unquestionable habit of flitting from
subject to subject. But Hunt, in more ways than one, was by no
means a 'delicate' spirit, if he was a spirit at all, and he was
frequently trivial, which Ariel never was. He had, however, gifts
much above those of the average man-of-letters-of-all-work to
6
1 There is such, undoubtedly, in Essex and Spenser.
2 • Dickens's shreds and patches, if not human beings are human effluences-
åroppolai' (Memorials of Lewis Campbell, p. 396).
>


## p. 221 (#245) ############################################

IX] Leigh Hunt as an Influence 221
His very
whose class he undoubtedly belongs ; he managed to do some
things, both in verse and in prose, which have a curious attraction
in their own way; he was a great benefactor by opening walks of
delight in the lower but quite respectable paradises of miscella-
neous literature; and, as an origin, or at least a maker of fresh
starts, in more than one literary department and fashion, he has
historical interest, superior to that possessed by some greater
executants, and never, perhaps, yet quite fairly allowed him. To
no single man is the praise of having transformed the eighteenth
century magazine, or collection of light miscellaneous essays, into
its subsequent form due so much as to Hunt. Allowing for the
undeniable truth that if a certain thing has to be done, evolu-
tionary fate always finds some one to do it, it may still be said
that, without Hunt, Sketches by Box would have been a kind
of Melchisedec, and Household Words improbable.
enemies in Blackwood owed him royalty a hundred years ago, and
it is doubtful whether even the most infallible and self-reliant
youth of the twentieth century, when it writes articles of the
'middle' style, and even, sometimes, of the purely critical, is not
similarly, though less directly, indebted to Hunt.
His influence on pure criticism and on poetry was not very great,
but in neither was it negligible. In verse, he had, beyond doubt,
the credit of being the first deliberately to desert the stopped
decasyllabic couplet which had reigned over the whole eighteenth
century and the latter part of the seventeenth, revising the over-
run of the Jacobeans and first Carolines. Keats may not have
learnt the change from Hunt only, but from the originals as well;
yet this does not lessen Hunt's importance. Hunt himself may
have been open to censure in his enjoyment of the revival, but
that is another question. In criticism, he has the merit, which
Macaulay long ago assigned to him, of a most unusual and, at the
time, almost unique catholicity, which was not alloyed (as, to some
extent, perhaps, it was in Lamb) by the presence of mere caprice,
and (as it still more certainly was in that admirable critic) by a sort
of complementary exclusiveness. Hunt could not only like both
Spenser and Dryden, both Addison and the great early seven-
teenth century dramatists, he could also expatiate into those
foreign literatures which, at the time (putting aside the new fashion
for German), were much less known than they had been. Except
Dante, who, for the most part, flew over his head, and who, when
he came nearer, brushed, as by wings, Hunt's prejudices in positive
religion heavily, it is difficult to name any great, or even good,


## p. 222 (#246) ############################################

222 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
6
writer whom he did not, so far as he could, appreciate, and his
famous recognition of the greatness of the Beatrice-Joanna and De
Flores part of Middleton's Changeling, is only the best known of
numerous good hits, where others, even Lamb, had missed. Even the
prejudices just mentioned did not mislead him to the same extent as
that to which they misled others of his contemporaries on both
sides, and, here again, he may be said to have been almost more
important as an influence than as a practitioner. But his actual
practice in all three directions—as poet, as critic and as 'mis-
cellanist'-has merit, and, in the latter two cases, volume, which
demand less general and more particular examination.
Hunt's poetical production, considering the length of his life
and the fluency of his pen, was not very extensive. When, some
dozen years before his death, he was asked or permitted by Moxon
to issue his Poetical Works in a small pocket volume, he got
together rather less than three hundred pages, but closely printed
and containing, perhaps, nine or ten thousand lines. It does not,
indeed, include one of his very best things—the fine sonnet with at
least one magnificent line,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands,
which he wrote in competition with Keats and Shelley and by
which he beat both these, his otherwise immeasurable betters.
But everything else by which he is best known and to be known is
here, The Story of Rimini, re-written but by no means improved ;
Abou ben Adhem, which, in the milder form of 'high seriousness,'
has few superiors of its scale, and the delightful rondeau, Jenny
kissed me, of which the same may be said in respect of graceful
mixture of sentiment and jest; the unequal but, in part, excellent
Man, Fish and Spirit, and, perhaps, a few more.
It must, however, be a somewhat exceptional taste of, rather,
appetite which would desiderate a larger body of Leigh Hunt's
verse. The few things highly praised above are very few, and, taken
with their company, they have a singular air of being out of it,
of having come there by some caprice of the muses. Rimini has
the historical value already assigned to it and more; for, besides
its versification, it gives other ‘patterning' to easy verse-narrative.
But the tone of it—if not, as was pretended at the time, immoral-
is mawkishly sentimental, the language trivial and slipshod and
the whole style what Persius meant by delumbe and in labris
natans. The choice of subject, after Dante, could hardly have
been more unfortunate, and Hunt showed the same insensibility
to an almost equal danger in choosing that of Hero and Leander.


## p. 223 (#247) ############################################

1xIX
] Leigh Hunt's Merits and Defects 223
The Palfrey is a pleasant enough variation, in the lighter octo-
syllable revived by Coleridge and Scott, of the old fabliau, and it
is, perhaps, unfair to The Glove that its triviality should have
provoked, and have been exposed by, Browning's opposition piece.
But this same triviality is everywhere in Hunt; and, in The Feast
of the Poets and that of the Violets (poetesses), it unfortunately
comes very near to vulgarity. It is, however, lifted out of this
by the serious purpose of Captain Sword and Captain Pen.
Some, especially those who share its anti-militarist spirit, have
held this to be the best thing for combined quantity and quality
that Hunt did in verse. Others differ; not merely antipathetically.
But actual triviality-not mere lightness of subject and treat-
ment as in the pseudo-Anacreon; and in some of the medieval poets,
especially Latin; or, again, in Johannes Secundus and Herrick and
Prior and Moore and many later poets but—triviality in the
proper sense, the triviality of the rags and straws that flit about
the common objects of literature, is fatal to poetry; and there is,
let it be repeated for the last time, far too much of this in Hunt's
verse. It is not absent from his prose; but it is much less
essentially fatal there, and, though he has in prose, perhaps, nothing
quite so good as the few best things of his verse, he has an
immensely larger proportion comparatively, and a very consider-
able bulk positively, of good and pleasant matter. The above-
mentioned merit of teaching the miscellaneous essay to cast the
once bright and graceful, but now wrinkled, faded and shabby,
skin of The Spectator form can hardly be exaggerated. He was
not so fortunate or so wise in adopting, in common with most of
his contemporaries, the abuse of the editorial 'we'-a thing not,
indeed, unsuitable to formal, and rather solemn, discussion, but
frequently irritating, if not absurd, in light discursive writing. Of
this same light discursive writing, however, Hunt was really a
master and even-in virtue of his precursorship especially, but not
solely—a great master. Nothing is easier than to show that Cole-
ridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, Landor, De Quincey and others, had qualities
which Hunt had not; but it may be questioned whether any one
of them had quite his faculty-the faculty of the born journalist
and book maker-of tackling almost any subject that presented
itself in a fairly adequate, and not seldom quite attractive, fashion.
He showed it in dozens (literally) of papers and books, from The
Reflector to The Old Court Suburb, the list of his achievements
including some remarkable tours de force such as that New Tatler
which he wrote single-handed for some eighteen months.
It is,


## p. 224 (#248) ############################################

224 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
again, easy to say that of this facile, gossipy, superficial way of
writing we have had enough and too much ; that it underlies
Ben Jonson's sentence on its first examples three hundred years
ago as being a 'flashy thing’; that the two hundred years which
saw comparatively little of it were happier than the succeeding
hundred which has seen a great deal. Yet it is certain that, as
Hunt restarted and refashioned the style, it has done very little
harm. It has, perhaps, done some good; and, beyond all question,
it has brought about a good deal of not disgraceful pleasure.
The man whose name can be put in such a sentence deserves
that the sentence should be recorded in history.
The singular mixture of merits and defects which has made it
necessary to tread the critical middle way with special care in the
case of the two preceding writers extends, also, to the third. With
De Quincey, indeed, we return to a higher general level than that
to which we have had to descend in order to consider Leigh Hunt.
Yet, though even Hunt's poetical altitudes are not of the highest
or loneliest, the things which have been referred to make him a
poet, if not a great poet, for moments; while De Quincey not only
never accomplished poetry but, as was noticed in the earlier part
of this chapter, indulged in something perilously like blasphemy of
it. For, to say that you might have been such a poet as your
neighbours when those neighbours are such as were De Quincey's,
and that you did not choose to be, comes perilously near the unfor-
givable. But his prose soars into regions which Hunt could never
have reached so far as form goes; while its matter, with inequali-
ties, again perilous, in some respects, keeps an altogether higher
level of intellect, scholarship, taste and so forth, than Hunt's
pleasant chatter could attain. But De Quincey's literary history, so
far as public acknowledgment goes, has been curious and contrasts
rather remarkably with that of his two fellows here. Beginning
distinctly late, Confessions of an English Opium Eater gave him,
with all good judges, a very high position which he never wholly lost.
But he did not follow it up with any substantive work; for some
time, he wrote hardly anything, and scattered what he produced
in miscellaneous and, most often, anonymous publications; and, till
very near the close of his long life, he held a curious and rather
anomalous position as a sort of amateur or freelance hovering on
the outskirts of literature and 'picqueering,' as they would have
said in Dryden's time, on the subject in brilliant but desultory
raids. Not till near the close did he attempt 'collection. '


## p. 225 (#249) ############################################

IX]
2 25
De Quincey's Popularity
There are probably not many experienced judges of the ways
of the public in regard to literature who would not have been
somewhat doubtful as to the success of collection and publica-
tion, in an unusually large number of volumes, of articles, scarcely
ever connected in subject, dealing, not unfrequently, with matters
not obviously popular, spread in composition over a period in
which public taste had altered not a little, and pervaded by all
sorts of tricks and mannerisms of style and thought. But the
' fifties,' after a period in which criticism had not commanded
much favour and in which it had not, perhaps, deserved much,
were recovering their appetite for it; and De Quincey, what-
ever subject he touched, was nothing if not critical, though, as
a literary critic of individuals, he was very untrustworthy. More-
over, the frequent presence in his writing of the most elaborately
ornamental passages appealed to tastes which he had himself
been one of the first to excite, and which had been steadily
growing.