WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864)

While Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, and other romantic critics went back to early English literature for their inspiration, Landor shows a reaction from the prevailing Romanticism by his imitation of the ancient classic writers.  His life was an extraordinary one and, like his work, abounded in sharp contrasts.  On the one hand, there are his egoism, his unncontrollable anger, his perpetual lawsuits, and the last sad tragedy with his children, which suggests King Lear and his daughters; on the other hand there is his steady devotion to the classics and to the cultivation of the deep wisdom of the ancients, which suggests Pindar and Cicero.  In his works we find the wild extravagance of Gebir, followed by the superb classic style and charm of Pericles and Aspasia.  Such was Landor, a man of high ideals, perpetually at war with himself and the world.

LIFE.  Lander’s stormy life covers the whole period from Wordsworth’s childhood to the middle of the Victorian Era.  He was the son of a physician, and was born at Warwick, in 1775.  From his mother he inherited a fortune; but it was soon scattered by large expenditures and law quarrels; and in his old age, refused help by his own children, only Browning’s generosity kept Landor from actual want.  At Rugby, and at Oxford, his extreme Republicanism brought him into constant trouble; and his fitting out a band of volunteers to assist the Spaniards against Napoleon, in 1808, allies him with Byron and his Quixotic followers.  The resemblance to Byron is even more strikingly shown in the poem Gebir, published in 1798, a year made famous by the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

A remarkable change in Lander’s life is noticeable in 1821, when, at forty-six years of age, after having lost his magnificent estate of Llanthony Abbey, in Glamorganshire, and after a stormy experience in Como, he settled down for a time at Fiesole near Florence.  To this period of calm after storm we owe the classical prose works for which he is famous.  The calm, like that at the center of a whirlwind, lasted but a short time, and Landor, leaving his family in great anger, returned to Bath, where he lived alone for more than twenty years.  Then, in order to escape a libel suit, the choleric old man fled back to Italy.  He died at Florence, in 1864.  The spirit of his whole life may be inferred from the defiant farewell which he flung to it: 

    I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
       Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art;
    I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
       It sinks, and I am ready to depart.