Gentle Savage
THIS book has told me, among other things, why Yeats thought it evidently desirable that he might `. . . dine at journey's end/With Landor and with Donne.' In the poem from which those famous lines come, Yeats is advising a beautiful young girl not to cheapen herself 'with every sort of company'; a very Landor-like injunction, for, though in his own words Landor was 'an aristo- cratic radical,' the emphasis was on aristocracy and remoteness : I know not whether I am proud, But this I know, I hate the crowd.
One can match this with several of Yeats's more unpleasant lines. But to label Landor a crusty old recluse would be as wrong as to call Yeats a Fascist. As.with Yeats, so with Landor, one builds up a complex picture of conflicting enthusiasms, passions and loyalties. In his early thirties, he joined the Spanish army as a private to. fight Joseph Bonaparte : forty years later, he was a fierce supporter of the Hungarian revolt of 1849, subscribing generously to the relief fund, and later writing (with, 'to us, an ominous foresight), 'England, by timely assistance to the Hungarians, would have saved Turkey and secured Egypt . . . and a long series of future wars might thus have been prevented.' For over seventy years, from his expulsion from Rugby to his miserable death at Florence, he struggled, made enemies, and main- tained his integrity. Yeats, one feels, might have been overwhelmed as one of those 'few and select' guests at Landor's metaphorical last supper.
• Whether the body of Landor's• writing has much true lasting value is not made clear by Mr. Elwin's book; this is a replevin of the man rather than 'the work.' And the man, in letters and re- ported conversations, comes across with great force and vividness; not likeable, but memorable and sometimes admirable. As a friend of Southey, Dickens, Browning -and, briefly, Swinburne, he • spanned the generations and illuminated them all with his vigorous gossip. 'Wordsworth,' he wrote to Caroline Southey, 'is a strange mixture of sheep and wolf, with one eye on a daffodil and the other on a canal-share.' And again : 'The surface of Wordsworth's mind, the poetry, has a good deal of staple about it, and will bear handling; but the inner, the conversational and private, has many coarse, intractable, dangling threads, fit only for the flock-bed equipage of grooms and drovers.'
The shrewd toughness of his mind, seldom able to show its individuality in what he thought to
be his real work—his Imaginary Conversations
and his verse—comes through in his more infor- mal words. He wrote of himself, for instance, 'As I never indulged in masquerades or other such buffooneries, so I desire that nothing of the kind may be exhibited about me at the close of life.
. . . We all go in the same Omnibus to the same terminus : we ought all to have the same accom- - modation, and to pay the same fare.' Arrogant and quirky -in most things, especially about his work (how often one finds him saying that he will never publish another line!), he could be dis- 'tur'bed and compassionate too. Mr. Elwin's . authoritative book shows us this 'gentle savage,' . as his friend Mary Boyle called him, in all his .ferocity and gentleneSs.
ANTHONY THWAITE
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