Excerpted and adapted from a review article published in the Times Literary Supplement under the title "Guenevere and Godiva" (10 July 2015), pp. 12-13. Dates, page references and links have been added here, as well as the two quoted passages and Roberts' comments on them. Note: the same portrait appeared with the original article. Click on the image to enlarge it and for more details about it.
Walter Savage Landor, by William Fisher
© National Portrait Gallery, London.
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) was a friend of Southey and Wordsworth – and also of Charles Dickens, John Forster and the Brownings. Yet his conviction that the classics had a monopoly on purity of style and feeling made him one-of-a-kind among both the Romantics and the Victorians: "One of Landor's peculiar claims upon our attention is the singularity of his pursuit of the healthful, the dignified, and the clean in his writing" (5).
As Adam Roberts admits, that sounds old-fashioned. But Landor was not at all old-fashioned in his ways. Dickens was a particular friend: he made Landor godfather to his second son Walter, who was named after him, and later used him as the model for the hearty and impulsive Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House: “There’s no simile for his lungs”, Mr Jarndyce says, describing Boythorn with relish. “Talking, laughing, or snoring, they make the beams of the house shake” (129). Landor’s reputation lived on with such memories of him. In 1912, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch still found Landor useful “to launch us on a wave from the true deeps” at the beginning of the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Preface, viii), selecting no fewer than seventeen of his poems – the shorter ones, of course, including “Rose Aylmer” – for the purpose. As late as 1934, in his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound was asking “Has England ever produced an all-round man of letters of equal stature” (80)? But how long could this last? To put it another way: why has his popularity lapsed so precipitously?
Adam Roberts notes his “current vanishing reputation” (186) and makes a noble and rather desperately chatty attempt, the first in decades, to rescue it. His tactic is to demonstrate that Landor’s commitment to purity was paradoxically adulterated with various kinds of fascinating messiness. Godiva, for example, was a heroine both in his poetry and his (then) much admired Imaginary Conversations, allowing Roberts to winkle out some “surreptitious eroticism” (173). He quotes this sestina about her, for example:
In every hour, in every mood,
O lady, it is sweet and good
To bathe the soul in prayer,
And, at the close of such a day,
When we have ceased to bless and pray
To dream of thy long hair.
Explaining that Landor claims to have written this while a schoolboy at Rugby, Roberts goes on to discuss it, finding that
the balance of five lines of praying to one line of erotic reverie looks like an imagination making a deal with itself — buying itself a little sensual indulgence at the cost of a lot of piety. This in itself is eloquent about the extent to which the poem's desire not only gets repressed but is actually determined by the restriction.... In this poem prayer is a cleansing and purifying thing (it bathes the soul) not despite but because young Landor is addressing his religious devotions to Godiva rather than the Virgin Mary. [59]
This kind of subtle and productive probing is undoubtedly the right approach here, and the best way to commend Landor to the postmodern age. Landor’s Cleanness ranges across his enormous output of poetry, prose and verse drama with similarly close, well-considered and, best of all, honestly questioning readings. “It’s a strange and rather baffling mix,” Roberts says of the 200-line heroic fragment “Crysaor,” asking the reader to let him “rummage around in the poem a moment longer to try and extract its sense” (71). The sense he comes up with here is also worth waiting for, and especially relevant to current concerns:
"What is Ambition? what but Avarice?" is the moral thrust of Landor's verse; an assault upon lucrative avarice ("in richer guise") that "marks the brow" like Cain, and which entails the face of "command," whose brow-creases resemble the line of a whip, "hard-lashed" upon the backs of subjects — or of slaves.... In other words, slavery is the hidden quantity that makes sense of "Crysaor"; unveiling it as a brief-epic fable of pride's fall, but of a fall into commercial, avaricious slave-trafficking.... [75-76]
Even Landor’s long and complicated epic Gebir gains significance from its very resistance to interpretation, and Roberts is good at involving us in his struggles with it.
This is all very disarming, and often entertaining, but can it do the job? Despite Landor’s evident talent for friendship, he was by all accounts an extraordinarily, even alarmingly difficult person to deal with: his genius was vitiated by his drive towards renunciation, which he sometimes complicated further by appreciating the need to renounce it – all this long before renunciation became a preoccupation of the late Victorian Theosophists. His edgy, conflicted personality comes through in his writings, and can be off-putting. Even more problematic, the so-called “contaminants” of his work include, Roberts admits, prolixity and its concomitant, boredom – the deadliest toxins of all. There will be few takers now for his classically themed Hellenics, or the “coiling bulk” of the Imaginary Conversations (124). Exposing the “Hydework” in Landor’s “steady, respectable, and dull Jekyll-poetry” is useful, even revelatory (187), but may not act quite as potently on our imaginations as Roberts hopes.
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. World's Classics ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934.
Quiller-Couch, Arthur. Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912. Internet Archive. Copy from the Digital Library of India. Web. 18 January 2023.
Roberts, Adam. Landor's Cleanness: A Study of Walter Savage Landor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Created 17 January 2023