BOOKS.

FOX AND LANDOR.*

THE existence in a private library of the solitary remaining copy of an early work by Walter Savage Lander has long been known, and we owe it to the public spirit of Lord Crewe that this Commentary on Memoirs of Mr. Fox Lately Written has now been placed beyond the chances and changes inseparable from its rarity. The book in question owed its inception and execution to a volume published in 1811 by an Irishman, John Bernard Trotter, who had acted for some time as the secretary and amanuensis of Charles Fox, and had in that capacity accompanied him to Paris on his brief visit during the Peace of Amiens. Canning and Ellis, reviewing it jointly in the Quarterly, declared that they had derived both pleasure and information from the perusal of it, but their faithful enumera-

tion of its faults must have left small room for gratitude in the mind of the author :—

"The rare infelicities of a style at once mean and inflated; assertions brought forward sometimes without any evidence at all, sometimes against received and established opinions, and not seldom against notorious and indisputable facts; adulation in one instance, and invective in others, equally beyond all bounds of modesty, taste, and feeling ; a professed contempt of all authority except that of the one individual whom he adores, and a misuse of that authority (sometimes direct, and sometimes by implication) to purposes which that individual would not have sanctioned or tolerated ; violence the more offensive as it is uttered with the accents of mourning; egoism continually breaking forth from under the disguise of an affected humility."

Truly those were spacious days for the critics, and Lander,

who was just then employed • upon a eulogy on Warren Hastings, in which he compared him with Charles James Fox, much to the detriment of the latter, straightway switched off and transferred the bulk of his observations to "Trotter's silly book." Their publication was undertaken by John Murray, the first of that ilk, and while still in the press the book was submitted to Southey, who enjoys the distinction of being almost the only man with whom Landor never quarrelled. Though no name was attached to it, the future Laureate detected at a glance the force and vehemence and personal

Charles James Fox: a Commentary on his Lire and Character. By Walter Savage Landor. Edited by Stephen Wheeler. With a Portrait. London : JAn Murray. [9s. net.]

touch of his friend. " Aut Diabolus aut Landor !" he ex- claimed, and he besought him at once to modify or cancel certain passages which were calculated to bring him into conflict with the law of libel. "It would equally grieve me," he wrote, "to have the book supprest, or to have it appear as it is; it is yours all over, the non imitabile fulmen." Apart from these passages, Mr. Murray took exception to the dedication of the Commentary to the President of the

United States, then trembling on the brink of war with this country. Landor only wished to point out what harm a conflict would do to America; but Southey con- curred with the publisher, and in a letter which is a model of tact and good feeling put it to Landor that he would be acting generously if he transferred the work elsewhere. The natural explosion followed; but thanks to Southey, it did not assume the dimensions that were customary when Landor took the warpath. He merely relieved •himself by imparting to his friend the conviction that Murray's withdrawal was due to persuasion on the part of " Canning or some other scoundrel whom I have piquetted in the work," but the work itself he condemned, in his own language, to eternal night. The whole edition was " damasked," with the exception, as Landor averred to the late Lord Houghton, of the one copy which he gave to Southey, and which, on the death of the latter, found its way into the library at Frystone.

So ends a curious chapter in the quarrels of authors, and the belated appearance of this brand plucked from the burning is an event of no ordinary interest. Its production has been happily and appropriately entrusted to Mr. Stephen Wheeler, the latest editor of Landoes correspondence, who has per- formed his work with a reserve and a sense of proportion that merit the highest praise. His notes are models, and they do not overburden the text; his introduction is an admirably compressed statement which sets the " unsubduable old Roman before us in his habit as he lived.

Of the Commentary itself Lord Houghton wrote long ago in the Edinburgh Review that it contained "perhaps more fair and moderate political and literary judgments delivered in Landoes own humour than any work of his earlier or maturer years." Fairness and moderation are not exactly the qualities for which one looks in the original of Laurence Boythorn ; in literature almost as much as in politics, his opinions owe too much to the prejudice of the moment to be always taken quite seriously. But in dealing with the classics, or with the masters of English prose and verse, his own gifts of intuition and of expression lead him to glimpses of profound com- prehension and to passages of surpassing beauty. The events and personages of the day have no such favoured treatment. He is shrewd, acute, and always picturesque ; but his facts, as was said of Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, are what be chooses to make them, and his characters are so many whipping-boys.

',undoes main object in the Commentary, so far as he had any object beyond that of exercising his rhetoric and exposing the absurdities of what he calls "Trotter's silly book," was to protest against that idolatry of Fox's memory which was fast becoming an article of faith in the Whig creed. Trotter bad written of "his youth, warm and impetuous, but full of extra- ordinary promise; his middle age, energetic and patriotic ; his latter days, commencing from the French revolution, simple, grand and sublime."

On this passage Landor remarks, in a style which suggests Swift engaged upon the dissection of Burnet :—

"His youth was very well known to have exceeded in every kind of profligacy the youth of any Englishman his contemporary. To the principles of a Frenchman he added the habits of a Malay in idleness, drunkenness and gaming. In middle life he was precisely the opposite of whoever was in power until he could spring forward to the same station. Whenever Mr. Pitt was wrong, Mr. Fox was right and then only. His morals, his taste, his literature, all were French ; he grew rather wiser afterwards. His principles were arbitrary when the Government of France was so. He approved of every change there, whether of men or measures. The Con- stituent Assembly, the Convention, Bris3ot, Robespierre, Tallien, Barras, Bonaparte, all these in succession were the objects of his admiration. His sagacity could find out something to palliate every crime they committed."

Charles Fox is not to be dismissed in this fashion : he will ever remain one of the most striking figures in the Parlia- mentary history of the eighteenth century, and his reputa- tion as the greatest of all Parliamentary debaters has nut yet been lowered. But to the dispassionate observer it is one of the strangest illustrations of party loyalty and personal fascination that he should ever have reached the pedestal from which he catches the eye of posterity. His apologists are fain to draw the sponge over his early years; they do not even attempt to justify his conduct at the most momentous crisis of his life, the coalition with Lord North ; they are sore put to it to defend many of the incidents of his later leadership. His factiousness and his unconcealed sympathy with whatever Power his country happened to be at war have left an evil tradition which has borne fruit within very recent times. If he upheld the Whig banner unflinchingly in the darkest hours, it was he who bad dragged the party down to the dust and condemned his friends and followers to a sojourn in the wilderness which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century after his death.

If the wasted career of Fox is a testimony to the supreme

value which the English people set on character, he affords a to less striking example of the ineffaceable influence of a kind heart and a sunny disposition, of "genius high and lore profound, and wit that loved to play, not wound." Macaulay has told us that the companions of Fox whom he met thirty years after that statesman had been carried to the grave could not speak of him without tears. Fox owes much indeed to Holland House and its associations, to the Maecenas who presided there, and to the gifted group who bore the caprices and insolence of Lady Holland with what grace they could command. His battles have been fought by champions as devoted as the clansmen who followed Montrose or the Prince. To them he is the protagonist in the long-drawn duel between George III. and the great Whig houses who loved the people well. He is bathed in the light that never was on sea or land. And history gave him an ideal foil in the "poor young Heaven-born Minister" who "Would not call a main, nor shake the midnight box, Nor flirt with all the pretty girls like gallant Charley Fox." But popular instinct is seldom altogether wrong, and if he

saw only "methods of barbarism" in the proceedings of his countrymen in America and on the Continent of Europe, he was, in his maturer days at least, the foe of oppression and arbitrary power at home. If it cannot be said of him as Roebuck, with a hardihood in flattery almost unparalleled, said of Brougham, that of every human right be was the champion, of every wrong the avenger, yet he had a burning and a glowing hatred of injustice wherever per- petrated; and in the last months of his life he came to realise that his country was embarked upon a struggle from which there was no going back.

Landor's judgments in the Commentary are chiefly valuable

as the evidence of a contemporary who is fully alive to the amiable qualities and humane disposition of Fox, who has no liking for his political opponents, who has no particular respect for the King, and who has been well termed an aristocratic Republican. They are marred by extravagances of temper and of phrase, by curious slips of memory, and by want of knowledge. He strangely attributes to Fox, not once, but twice, the saying of the elder Pitt that Hanover should be as dear to an Englishman as Hampshire. He credits him with the disasters that befell our military adventures in South America, culminating in the surrender at Buenos Ayres, when the responsibility, apart from Whitelock's misbehaviour, must in common fairness be assigned to Wyndham. "By Mr. Fox's negligence and indecision," he writes, "such actions were com- mitted and ordered at Buenos Ayres as produced the death of many brave men, infinite calamity, and indelible disgrace." And again: "The conduct of the Whig minister in regard to Spanish America proves how wide is the difference between a debater and a statesman, between the versatile suitor of popu- larity and the true lover of justice."

The Buenos Ayres incident, indeed, supplies the key to much of the Commentary. Landor was an enthusiastic Hispanophile who had given his money and a certain amount of personal service to the cause of the Junta at the outbreak of the Spanish insurrection. He shared in the general indig- nation at the mishandling of our land forces and the corrup- tion or fatuity which occasioned the choice of the commanders. He was not among the detractors of Wellington, but in the spring of 1612 the success of the Peninsular Campaign had not begun to obliterate the shameful memories of Walcheren ; and among the exalted delinquents pilloried by Landor, none occupies a less enviable position than the second Earl of Chatham :—

"No name is mentioned ; I disclaim all reference, all allusion. If the stigma flies forth against any, it must be by its own peculiar aptitude and attraction. According to the reports which are prevalent, and which I would rather refute than repeat, the quarters of a brave and active officer were taken from him, he was cast out to die among the pestilential marshes that the state turtles of this glutton might have a more commodious kitchen. He was not to be disturbed, or spoken to, or called on, until several hours after noon; he was not to be seen while he was dressing ; he was not to be intruded on at his breakfast ; he was not to be molested at his dinner; he was not to be hurried at his wine ; he was not to be awakened at his needful and hardly earned repose."

Whether criticising poets or historians or orators, Landor is here, as ever, both picturesque and suggestive. Of Burke he pronounces that "lie was equally clear and magnificent in the development and display of his grand principles ; but be hurried through passages which he had never explored, and the phantom he was pursuing struck the lump out of his hand." Many of the sayings in this volume have been reshaped and polished in various of Landor's later works. Sir Leslie Stephen has remarked on his strange inability to appreciate Spenser, the poet's poet above all others, and nowhere does Landor ride his unfortunate hobby more strenuously than in the pages before us. He finds in him "a lowness of spirits and a peevish whine." "The Faery Queen is rambling and dis- continuous, full of every impropriety, and utterly deficient in a just conception both of passion and character." "Spenser," be suggests, "has been treated with peculiar lenity and favour because no poet has been found so convenient by the critics to set up against their contemporaries." Hardly less curious and perverse is his verdict on Dryden, of whose poems he declares that "a part seems to have been composed in a

brothel, the remainder in a gin-shop " ; on the other hand, "ha is never affected : he had not time for dress. There is no obscurity, no redundancy ; but in every composition, in poetry or prose, a strength and spirit purely English, neither broken by labour nor by refinement. Still he is not what Mr. Fox and others have called him, a great poet; for there is not throughout his works one stroke of the sublime or one touch of the pathetic, which are the only true and adequate criteria. Nor is there that just description of manners in his dramas, which is very im- portant though secondary. For these reasons he will never be considered by good judges as equal to Otway, to Chatterton, to Burns, or even to Cowper."

This may fairly rank among the curiosities of criticism, and it is not a fair specimen of the contents of the book ; but whatever Landor has to say is said with such vigour, such confidence, and such an air of unalterable conviction as to make the reader wonder for the moment whether it is he or the author who is nodding. It is as a glimpse into Landor's mind, as an additional chapter in the life of one of the strangest and most original among English men of letters, that his Commentary possesses its real and permanent value.