DR. JOHN LEYDEN (1775-1811)1

In the kindly, vivid, and critical account of the life and work of John Leyden, Sir Walter Scott, after praising him as a scholar, for his early knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Icelandic, Hebrew, Arabic and Persian, and the ease with which he acquired and put aside all sciences and kinds of knowledge, completes the picture by adding that he was 'a fearless player at single-stick, a formidable boxer, a distinguished adept at leaping, running, walking, climbing, and all exercises which depend on animal spirits and muscular effort.' His appearance in society, where he imitated the manners and assumed the tone of a Borderer of former times, was, it seems, 'somewhat appalling to persons of low animal spirits.' 'Elasticity and ardour of genius' are the epithets by which Scott characterises him in the first sentence of his memoir, and no words could be more explicit. 'An ardent and unutterable longing for information of every description' was added to 'an irresistible thirst for discovery,' and in order to accompany an expedition to India he qualified himself in six months for his degree in medicine and surgery. There, after many 'adventures to outrival the witch of Endor,' given up five times by the doctors, and living 'as happy as the day was long,' he set himself, in the Indian heats, and in the intervals of his duty in Indian hospitals, to learn Hindustani, Mahratta, Tamal, Telinga, Canara, Sanscrit, Malayalam, Malay, Maldivian, Mapella and Armenian. It was the incessant labour of an abnormal and indefatigable brain that killed him; and he died 'as devoted a martyr in the cause of science as ever died in that of religion,' as Scott said of him in his just and generous way.

As a poet Leyden had, in another of Scott's acute phrases,

1 (1) Poetical Remains, edited by James Morton, 1819. (2) Poems and Ballads, edited by Robert White, with Memoir by Sir Walter Scott, 1858.

'more genius than taste,' though there is taste, as well as personal feeling, in a sonnet on "The Sabbath Morning' which deserves a place in anthologies. Much of his earlier verse was written with too easy a facility, and in the manner of his time. There is little originality even in the ballad of 'The Mermaid,' of which Scott made the extraordinary statement that theopening of it 'exhibits a power of numbers, which, for the mere melody of sound, has seldom been excelled in English poetry.' 'Lord Soulis,' a ballad of wizardy, is incomparably finer, and best of all are his Malay poems, the feverish address to his green agate-handled kriss, the 'Dirge of the Departed Year,' together with the 'Finland Mother's Song,' the 'Arab Warrior,' and 'The Fight of Praya,' a Malay dirge. There are a few others, technically finer, such as 'The Battle of Assaye,' which was probably suggested, in its ringing metrical effect, by Campbell's battle-songs, but it is, in any case, on a level with all but the finest of them. Here is one of the vigorous stanzas:

'But, when we first encountered man to man,

Such odds came never on,

Against Greece or Macedon,

When they shook the Persian throne

Mid the old barbaric pomp of Ispahan.'

Eastern colour, and a kind of ferocity, is to be found in the best of Leyden's poems, together with something of that battling and indomitable temperament which was life and death to him. It would be incorrect to call him a scholarly poet, but there was a wild flicker of poetry in the heart of a scholar.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864) 1

LANDOR has said, not speaking of himself:

'Wakeful he sits, and lonely, and unmoved,

Beyond the arrows, views, or shouts of men.'

1 (1) Poems, 1795. (2) A Moral Epistle, 1795. (3) Gebir, 1798; second edition with Latin version, 1803. (4) Poems from the Arabic and Persian,

And of himself he has said, in perhaps his most memorable

lines:

'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.'

In the preface to the 'Heroic Idyls' he writes: 'He who is within two paces of the ninetieth year may sit down and make no excuses; he must be unpopular, he never tried to be much otherwise, he never contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far eastern uplands, meditating and remembering.' He remains alone in English literature, to which he brought, in verse and prose, qualities of order and vehemence, of impassioned thinking and passionless feeling, not to be found combined except in his own work. And in the man there was a like mingling of opposites: nobility and tenderness, haste and magnanimity, courtesy and irresponsible self-will, whatever is characteristically English and whatever is characteristically Roman, with the defects of every quality. Landor is monumental by the excess of his virtues, which are apt to seem, at times, a little too large for the stage and scenery of his life. He desired to live with grandeur; and there is grandeur in the outlines of his character and actions. But some gust of the will, some flurry of the nerves, was always at hand, to trouble or overturn this comely order. The ancient 1800. (5) Poetry by the Author of 'Gebir,' 1802. (6) Simonidea, 1806. (7) Ad Gustavum Regem, Ad Gustavum exsulem, 1810. (8) Count Julian, 1812. (9) Idyllia Heroica, 1814. (10) Idyllia Heroica decem, 1820. (11) Gebir, Count Julian, and other Poems, 1831. (12) Terry Hogan, 1835. (13) Pentalogia (included in the Pentameron), 1837. (14) A Satire on Satirists and Admonition to Detractors, 1837. (15) Andrea of Hungary and Giovanni of Naples, 1839. (16) Fra Rupert, 1840. (17) The Siege of Ancona, 1842. (18) Collected Works, 2 vols., 1846. (19) Poemata et Inscriptiones, 1847. (20) The Hellenics of Walter Savage Landor, 1847; revised and enlarged edition, 1859. (21) Italics, 1848. (22) Five Scenes in Verse on Beatrice Cenci in The Last Fruit off an Old Tree, 1853. (23) Scenes for the Study, 1856. (24) Dry Sticks fagoted by W. S. Landor, 1858. (25) Heroic Idyls,

Roman becomes an unruly child, the scholar flings aside cap and gown and leaps into the arena.

Landor began to write verse when he was a schoolboy, and it is characteristic of him that poetry came to him first as a school exercise, taken for once seriously. Latin was to him, it has been well said, 'like the language of some prior state of existence, rather remembered than learned.' His first book, published at the age of twenty, contains both Latin and English verse, together with a defence, in Latin, of the modern use of that language. When, a few years later, he began to work upon his first serious poem, 'Gebir,' he attempted it both in Latin and in English, finally decided to write it in English, and, later on, turned it also into Latin.

'Gebir' was published in 1798 the year of the 'Lyrical Ballads,' and, in its individual way, it marks an epoch almost as distinctly. No blank verse of comparable calibre had appeared since the death of Milton, and, though the form was at times actually reminiscent both of Milton and of the Latin structure of some of the portions as they were originally composed, it has a quality which still remains entirely its own. Cold, sensitive, splendid, so precise, so restrained, keeping step with such a stately music, scarcely any verse in English has a more individual harmony, more equable, more refreshingly calm to the ear. It contains those unforgettable lines, which can never be too often repeated:

'But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue
Within, and they that lustre have imbibed

In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave:
Shake one and it awakens, then apply
Its polisht lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'

There are in it single lines like,

'The sweet and honest avarice of love';

and there are lines marching like these:

'the feast

Was like the feast of Cepheus, when the sword
Of Phineus, white with wonder, shook restrain'd,
And the hilt rattled in his marble hand.'

Has not that the tread of the Commander in 'Don Juan'? And there are experiments in a kind of naïveté :

'Compared with youth

Age has a something like repose.'

Tennyson is anticipated here:

'The silent oars now dip their level wings,

And weary with strong stroke the whitening wave.'

But where the most intimately personal quality of Landor is seen is in the lofty homeliness of speech which is always definite, tangible, and about definite, tangible things. The Gadites are building, and Landor, remembering the workmen he has seen in the streets of Warwick, notes:

'Dull falls the mallet with long labour fringed.'

Gebir is wrestling with the nymph, who sweats like any mortal; Landor does not say so, but he sets her visibly before us,

'now holding in her breath constrain'd,

Now pushing with quick impulse and by starts,
Till the dust blackened upon every pore.'

We are far enough from Milton here; not so far, perhaps, from the Latin precision of statement; but certainly close to reality. And it is reality of a kind new to English poetry, painter's, sculptor's, reality, discovered, as we have seen, at precisely the moment when Wordsworth was discovering for himself the reality of simple feeling, and Coleridge the reality of imaginative wonder.