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SOME NOTES ON THE UNPOPULARITY OF

LANDOR.

BY JOHN BAILEY, M.A., F.R.S.L.

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[Read November 26th, 1924.]

I UNDERSTAND that it is some time since the Royal Society of Literature had a paper about Landor. Perhaps that is because your papers are expected to set out some new theory, or some discovery, and I am not aware that there is or has been anything of the kind to set out in the case of Landor. I do not know of many books of importance dealing with him which have appeared during the last thirty years. But I will begin by saying a few words about those which I do know before coming to my special subject. Mr. Stephen Wheeler issued in 1897 a very interesting volume of Letters and Unpublished Writings.' This is a very pleasant possession. It gives us the contents, or some of the contents, of a box made for Landor from the wood of a cedar which had fallen at Ipsley Court, his place in Warwickshire. His sister had it made at his wish, and he used it as a desk for eighteen years, and then a little before his death gave it to his friend Arthur de Noé Walker. The desk remained for over thirty years in the possession of Dr. Walker, who added his own letters from Landor to its contents; and, as he had acted as Landor's intermediary with publishers, several of Landor's compositions which had for one reason or another

VOL. V, N.S.

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failed of publication came to find a place in the box, as well as many MS. corrections which he had wished to make in his published work. Ultimately Dr. Walker placed the contents of the box at Mr. Wheeler's disposition, and the result was this volume which all Landorians take pleasure in possessing. Its most valuable contents are three unpublished conversations; one between Savonarola in his last hour and the Prior of St. Mark's, which Mr. Wheeler gives in full; another between the Countess of Albany, Charles Edward's widow, and Alfieri, of which he gives only an extract; and, what is to-day the most interesting of the three, a dramatic scene in blank verse between Joan of Arc and her judge. Already Joan of Arc had been the heroine of what is certainly among the half-a-dozen most dramatic and most moving of Landor's "Imaginary Conversations," that entitled "The Maid of Orleans and Agnes Sorel." In the scene published by Mr. Wheeler we see her, where we have also been seeing her in these last months, face to face with her judge. And what Landor makes her say, and the manner of it, curiously reminds us of some things in Mr. Shaw's drama-I suppose because both are, of course in very different degrees, ultimately founded on the record of her actual words and behaviour. Landor must have often heard her discussed by his great friend Southey whose works begin with a boyish epic in ten books on her story. But the epic ends with the Coronation, and in the preface Southey expressly says that he had not seen L'Averdy's publications of the original records dealing with Joan. They were issued in 1790, and Landor may possibly have seen them.

At any rate he seems somehow to have got a conception of the Maid's bearing which roughly corresponds with the truth, and with the character as drawn by Mr. Shaw. I will read a few words in which I think you will agree that Joan is as like Mr. Shaw's Joan as her judge is unlike his judge, so that, if you can forget me and listen only to Landor, you will, I think, easily think, easily imagine that in what she says you are again hearing the voice of the Joan who was Miss Sybil Thorndike.

JOAN OF ARC AND HER JUDGE.

Judge: After due hearing in our court supreme
Of temporal and spiritual lords,

Condemn'd art thou to perish at the stake
By fire, forerunner of the flames below.

Hearest thou? Art thou stunn'd? Art thou gone mad?
Witch! think not to escape and fly away,

As some, the like of thee, 'tis said, have done.
Joan: The fire will aid my spirit to escape.

Judge: Listen, ye lords. Her spirit! Hear ye that?
She owns, then, to have her Familiar.

And whither (to Joan)-whither would the spirit, witch,
Bear thee?

Joan :

Judge:

To Him who gave it.

Lucifer ?

Joan: I never heard the name until thus taught.
Judge: He hath his imps.

Joan:

Judge:

I see he hath.

My lords!

Why look ye round, and upward at the rafters ?
Smile not, infernal hag! For such thou art,
Altho' made comely to beguile the weak,
By thy enchantments and accursed spells.
Knowest thou not how many brave men fell
Under thy sword, and daily?

wwww

Joan :

God knows best
How many fell—may their souls rest in peace!
We wanted not your land, why want ye ours?
France is our country, England yours; we hear
Her fields are fruitful; so were ours before
Invaders came and burnt our yellowing corn,
And slew the labouring oxen in the yoke,

And worried, in their pasture and their fold,

With thankless hounds, more sheep than were devour'd. This and the Savonarola are, I think, much the most important contents of the volume. But there are, besides, some interesting things in prose and verse, a good many letters, some account of Landor's relations with Rose Aylmer, and with Ianthe (afterwards Madame de Molandé), and a bibliography of Landor. Amongst the verses is a pleasant little apology for the Hellenics, which begins:

"None had yet tried to make men speak

In English as they would in Greek.”

Whatever one may think of the truth of Landor's claim to have done that, it is curious to notice that it was his great disciple Swinburne of whom the greatest Greek scholar, I suppose, of the last generation, Walter Headlam, said that "he was the only Englishman who could write Greek."

Two years later, in 1899, Mr. Wheeler issued a further volume of 'Unpublished Letters.' They are letters given to him by Lady Graves-Sawle, who had been Rose Paynter, daughter of a sister of Landor's Rose Aylmer. Landor had revived acquaintance with Mrs. Paynter at Fiesole before 1835, and remained intimate with her and all her family, and particularly this daughter, for the rest of his life. The letters

contain little talks about books, and are for the most part just gracious and charming outpourings of an old man's affection, and a new proof, if one were needed, of his rare gift for saying pretty things, both in prose and verse. Mr. Wheeler has edited them with brief but admirable biographical introductions to each section and notes full of information. They occupy some two hundred pages, and are followed by another hundred and fifty pages devoted to the reproduction of Landor's letters to The Examiner on all sorts of political subjects. I confess that, though I am a very politically-minded animal, I find these quite unreadable. Landor took himself seriously as a politician, but nobody else, either then or now, has found it easy to do so. On the principles of politics he often says admirable, even profound things but in judging of contemporary politics and political persons he was the entirely helpless sport of the violent but varying winds of his personal prejudices.

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The same veteran collector of Landoriana printed in 1907 the Commentary on the Life and Character of Charles James Fox,' which Landor wrote on the appearance, in 1811, of J. B. Trotter's Memoirs of Fox,' and was publishing in 1812, when Southey intervened, and between his objections (on the danger of a libel action) and Murray's reluctance the Commentary was, as Landor said, "condemned to eternal night." But Southey had had a copy and kept it; and it is the only one which now survives, and survives in the best possible hands, those of our President, Lord Crewe. I cannot honestly say that, in a world overcrowded with books, it much deserved reprinting.

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