Fear was his ruling passion: yet was love,
Of timid kind, once known his heart to move;
It led his patient spirit where it paid
Its languid offerings to a listening maid;
She, with her widow’d mother, heard him speak,
And sought a while to find what he would seek:
Smiling he came, he smiled when he withdrew,
And paid the same attention to the two;
Meeting and parting without joy or pain,
He seem’d to come that he might go again.
* * *
Presentation, description, in place of Popean comment.
CRABBE’S The Borough, 1810
Lo! yonder shed; observe its garden-ground,
With the low paling, form’d of wreck, around:
There dwells a fisher; if you view his boat,
With bed and barrel’t is his house afloat;
Look at his house, where ropes, nets, blocks, abound,
Tar, pitch, and oakum—’t is his boat aground:
That space enclosed, but little he regards,
Spread o’er with relics of masts, sails, and yards:
Fish by the wall, on spit of elder, rest,
Of all his food, the cheapest and the best,
By his own labour caught, for his own hunger dress’d.
Here our reformers come not; none object
To paths polluted, or upbraid neglect;
None care that ashy heaps at doors are cast,
That coal-dust flies along the blinding blast:
None heed the stagnant pools on either side,
Where new-launch’d ships of infant sailors ride:
Rodneys in rags here British valour boast,
And lisping Nelsons fright the Gallic coast.
They fix the rudder, set the swelling sail,
They point the bowsprit and they blow the gale:
True to her port the frigate scuds away,
Change from Pope to Crabbe, change from Voltaire to Stendhal and Flaubert. Crabbe conveying information, not yet eschewing comment on principle, though much more effective where he doesn’t insert it.
Perfectly clear even from these two excerpts that he is doing the novelist’s work, Dickens, Disraeli, etc. History of the state of England at the start of the nineteenth century, Michelet’s method already in use.
That window view!—oil’d paper and old glass
Stain the strong rays, which, though impeded, pass
And give a dusty warmth to that huge room,
…..
Pale and faint upon the floor they fall
Or feebly gleam on the opposing wall,
The floor, once oak, now piec’d with fir unplaned
Crabbe’s dates 1754 to 1832—Jane Austen’s 1775 to 1817.
But The Borough did not appear till 1810. It would be far easier to counterfeit Crabbe’s poem than to write a Jane Austen novel.
And these novels are, with perfect justice, the more widely read a century after Crabbe’s death. Crabbe is undeniably reading matter, not singing matter, and he is well worth reading though I don’t imagine he is greatly re-read. Jane’s novels don’t either replace him or wipe him from the map. Rhymed couplets are unlikely to compete with De Maupassant, let alone with Hollywood.
If one is convinced that the film offers, in the present century, a better form than the stage, he is unlikely to advise anyone to write any more rhymed couplets.
On the other hand, given a curiosity about the social condition of England in 1810, can you find a more condensed account than Crabbe’s of the whole social order?
The British novelists’ dates are (for comparison)
Richardson 1689-1761
Fielding 1707-54
Smollett 1721-71
Sterne 1713-68
Reading Crabbe is a bit like trying to go somewhere on Fulton’s first steamboat; he does, nevertheless, get you somewhere, and on the whole if you compare him with English prose fiction of an earlier date, his verse is as readable as anything save possibly the first part of Tom Jones, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and Tristram Shandy as far as that interminable sermon wherein many readers must afore now have been boggit.
The Rev. Crabbe had, by contrast to Landor, no Greek, as he tells us in ‘The Borough’ (Prison).
Homer, nay Pope! (for never will I seek
Applause for learning—naught have I with Greek)
Gives us the secrets of his pagan hell
Where ghost with ghost in sad communion dwell
…..
When a new spirit in that world was found
A thousand shadowy forms came flitting round
But his early medical training came in handy at least once when he was visiting a country house and the midwife failed to arrive…. Landor would not in such case have been of signal assistance.
* * *
The child was called Lemuel in reference to intervention if not of heaven, at least to an ordained subaltern.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 1775-1864
From Alcaeus
Wormwood and rue be on his tongue
And ashes on his head,
Who chills the feast and checks the song
With emblems of the dead!
Be young and jovial, wise and brave,
Such mummers are derided.
His sacred rites shall Bacchus have
Unspared and undivided.
Caught by my friends, I fear no mask
Impending from above,
I only fear the latter flask
That holds me from my love.
LANDOR 1775-1864
Epithalamium
Weep Venus and ye
Adorable Three
Who Venus for ever environ.
Pounds, shillings and pence
And shrewd sober sense
Have clapt the strait waistcoat on * * *
Asterisks left by the author and concealing nothing.
Off Lainot and Turk
With pistol and dirk,
Nor palace nor pinnace set fire on,
The cord’s fatal jerk
Has done its last work
And the noose is now slipped upon * * *
Asterisks left by the author and concealing nothing.
CLXXXIV
God’s laws declare
Thou shalt not swear
By aught in heaven above or earth below.
Upon my honour! Melville cries;
He swears, and lies;
Does Melville then break God’s commandment?
No.
LANDOR: Poems and Epigrams,
probably edition of 1846
CLXXXIX
Does it become a girl so wise,
So exquisite in harmonies,
To ask me when I do intend
To write a sonnet? What? my friend!
A sonnet? Never. Rhyme o’erflows
Italian, which hath scarcely prose;
And I have larded full three-score
With sorte, morte, cuor, amor.
But why should we, altho’ we have
Enough for all things, gay or grave,
Say, on your conscience, why should we
Who draw deep seans along the sea,
Cut them in pieces to beset
The shallows with a cabbage-net?
Now if you ever ask again
A thing so troublesome and vain,
By all your charms! before the morn,
To show my anger and my scorn,
First I will write your name a-top,
Then from this very ink shall drop
A score of sonnets; every one
Shall call you star, or moon, or sun,
Till, swallowing such warm-water verse,
Even sonnet-sippers sicken worse.
CCXX
…..
Since Chaucer was alive and hale
No man hath walkt along our roads with step
So active, so enquiring eye
, or tongue
So varied in discourse.
But warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze
Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
(From his lines to Robt. Browning)
LANDOR 1775-1864
The Duke of York’s Statue
Enduring is the bust of bronze,
And thine, O flower of George’s sons,
Stands high above all laws and duns.
As honest men as ever cart
Convey’d to Tyburn, took thy part
And raised thee up to where thou art.
XIV From Last Fruit off an old tree
Ireland never was contented …
Say you so? you are demented.
Ireland was contented when
All could use the sword and pen,
And when Tara rose so high
That her turrets split the sky,
And about her courts were seen
Liv’ried Angels robed in green,
Wearing, by St. Patrick’s bounty,
Emeralds big as half a county.
II From Dry Sticks
Macaulay’s Peerage
Macaulay is become a peer;
A coronet he well may wear;
But is there no one to malign?
None: then his merit wants the sign.
Heroic Idylls with Additional Poems
XIII
’Twas far beyond the midnight hour
And more than half the stars were falling,
And jovial friends, who’d lost the power
Of sitting, under chairs lay sprawling;
Not Porson so; his stronger pate
Could carry more of wine and Greek
Than Cambridge held; erect he sate;
He nodded, yet could somehow speak:
‘’Tis well, O Bacchus! they are gone,
Unworthy to approach thy altar!
The pious man prays best alone,
Nor shall thy servant falter.’
Then Bacchus too, like Porson, nodded.
Shaking the ivy on his brow,
And graciously replied the godhead:
‘I have no votary staunch as thou.’
LANDOR 1775-1864
Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives
Alcestis rises from the Shades;
Verse calls them forth; ’tis Verse that gives
Immortal Youth to mortal Maids.
Soon shall Oblivion’s deepening Veil
Hide all the peopled Hills ye see,
The gay, the proud, while Lovers hail
These many summers you and me.
The tear for fading Beauty check
For passing Glory cease to sigh,
One Form shall rise above the Wreck,
One name, Ianthe, shall not die.
LANDOR 1775-1864
Old Style
Aurelius, Sire of Hungrinesses!
Thee thy old friend Catullus blesses,
And sends thee six fine watercresses.
There are those who would not think me quite
(Unless we were old friends) polite
To mention whom you should invite.
Look at them well; and turn it o’er
In your own mind … I’d have but four …
Lucullus, Caesar, and two more.
* * *
Landor, the man of letters, usually invoked as model of the ‘lapidary style’ or of the ‘well-turned verse’. The effect of his severe classical studies never deserts him, and the cantabile quality never wholly deserts the verses of his shorter poems, even when they are manifestly inscribed.
DIRCE
Stand close around, ye Stygian set
With Dirce in one bark convey’d,
Or Charon seeing, may forget
That he is old, and she a shade.
Moral: a man wanting to conserve a tradition would always do well to find out, first, what it is.
A man preferring ‘a manner of writing’ to the living language, runs considerable danger if he have not a culture as thorough as Landor’s, and a great part of Landor’s longer poems are still inaccessible because the language is so far removed from any speech ever used anywhere.
You go to Crabbe for England of 1810, you can go to Landor for an epitome; all culture of the encyclopedists reduced to manageable size, in the Imaginary Conversations and full of human life ventilated, given a human body, not merely indexed.
A figure to put against Voltaire. BUT for the Chronology! Voltaire was at WORK shovelling out the garbage, the Bourbons, the really filthy decayed state of French social thought.
Voltaire: 1694-1778.
Landor: 1775-1864
They are mental contemporaries. Landor comes after the work is done, Rabelais, Peter Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, or further back Bude, Lorenzo Valla, Landor gathers it up, and if you want a handy introduction you have it in his Conversations; written in Stendhal’s time (1783-1842).
Voltaire’s English contemporary was chronologically Samuel Johnson (1709-84) listed as ‘moralist, essayist and lexicographer’, a figure of fun, an absurdity, the stage Englishman of Goldoni, 1707-93, admirable because he will not lick boots, but intellectually ‘fuori del mondo’, living in the seventeenth century, so far as Europe is concerned.
Very possibly the best mind in England of his day, save for those months that Voltaire spent in London.
Landor’s Dialogues are richer than Fontenelle’s, but Fontenelle was born in 1657 and died in 1757.
Landor’s addition differs from that which Chaucer infused into his continental matter, but the parallel is worth inspecting. In Landor’s case the time lag must be computed. He was so far ahead of his British times that the country couldn’t contain him, and Anatole France was still in a certain sense going on in wake of Landor, within living memory, and indeed down to the day of his death, a man of much slighter importance.
TO RECAPITULATE
CHAUCER contemporary, participant in the continental life of his time, in the mind of the continent, though his technique was in part centuries old.
SHAKESPEARE (Jacques Père, spelling it Shaxpear, because J is either pronounced hard or confused with I) making sixteenth-century plays out of fifteenth-century Italian news. The Italian stage had given the commedia dell’ arte, and Italian oratory, law court stuff, the example of ornate speeches. Shakespeare already looking back to Europe from the outside.
LANDOR 80 per cent retrospective, though this mustn’t be taken to mean that he wasn’t driving piles into the mud, and preparing foundations—which have been largely unused by his successors.
EXHIBIT
In Mantua territory half is slough, Half pine-tree forest, maples, scarlet oaks Breed o’er the river-beds, even Mincio
chokes
With sand the summer through, but ’tis
morass
In winter up to Mantua walls. There
was,
Some thirty years before this evening’s
coil,
One spot reclaimed from the surrounding
spoil;
Goito, just a castle built amid
A few low mountains; firs and larches
hid
Their main defiles and rings of vineyard
bound
The rest …..
You gain the inmost chambers, gain at
last
A maple-panelled room; that haze which
seems
Floating about the panel if there gleams
A sunbeam over it, will turn to gold
And in light-graven characters unfold
The Arab’s wisdom everywhere; what
shade
Marred them a moment, those slim pillars
made,
Cut like a company of palms to prop
The roof, each kissing top en
twined with
top,
Leaning together; in the carver’s mind
Some knot of bacchanals, flushed cheek
combined
With straining forehead, shoulders purpled,
hair
Diffused between, who in a goat skin bear
A vintage; graceful sister-palms! But
quick
To the main wonder, now. A vault,
see; thick
Black shade about the ceiling, though
fine slits
Across the buttress suffer light by fits
Upon a marvel in the midst. Nay,
stoop—
A dullish grey-streaked cumbrous font, a
group
Round it—each side of it, where’er one
sees—
Upholds it; shrinking Caryatides
Of just-tinged marble like Eve’s lillied
flesh
Beneath her maker’s finger when the fresh
First pulse of life shot brightening the
snow,
The font’s edge burthens every shoulder, so
They muse upon the ground, eyelids half
closed,
Some, with meek arms behind their backs
disposed,
Some, crossed above their bosoms, some,
to veil
Their eyes, some, propping chin and cheek
so pale,
Some, hanging slack an utter helpless