Emerson’s article Walter Savage Landor appeared in The Dial in October 1841. Emerson had had the pleasure of visiting Landor eight years earlier at Landor’s villa in Fiesole. Following the essay in The Dial was a few pages of Landor’s writings selected by Emerson. These unfortunately were not kept as part of Emerson’s “collected.”
Emerson, though he thought highly of Landor and says so in the essay, does not do to this subject what he does to so many of his subjects–turn him into a saint. In fact, Emerson’s description of Landor is so far from being saintly it is almost astonishing how much he talks about the man’s negative traits. But perhaps it is evidence of Emerson’s own ambivalence toward Landor. Or perhaps it is also due to Landor still being alive so that there were many people who could judge for themselves the veracity of Emerson’s description:
A sharp, dogmatic man, with a great deal of knowledge, a great deal of worth, and a great deal of pride; with a profound contempt for all that he does not understand; a master of all elegant leaning, and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and yet prone to indulge a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and language.
Emerson’s biggest gripe are those images which even calls “licentious” and he goes on at length about (without giving an example).
But in spite of Landor’s “eccentricity,” the word Emerson uses as a polite euphemism for Landor’s licentious images, Emerson still praises him as a “faithful scholar” and a “friend and consoler of mankind.” He also places Landor among the literary greats, saying that Landor’s love of truth and beauty place him in that “sacred class.”
And while Emerson does not deem Landor a poet or a philosopher, he exalts him as “the most useful and agreeable of critics.” It also helps that Landor’s writing style sounds suspiciously like Emerson’s and the “elements of style” that Emerson enumerated in his Art and Criticism lecture. This is important to think about as Emerson’s final assessment of Landor is that his merit rests “on the value of his sentences.” To say about a writer and a friend that the best thing about him is his great sentences seems at first to be mean and petty. But to Emerson, a man who values words and sentences, it is intended as high praise. It is especially high praise as he ends the essay by equating the strength of Landor’s sentences with those of Socrates whose sentences were often described as “cubes, which will stand firm, place them how or where you will.”
If you are interested in finding out more about Landor, Wikipedia has a fairly extensive article about him. There are also some examples of Landor’s poetry and if you long for some Landor quotations, Bartleby can satisfy your need.
Next week’s Emerson: Prayers
Having read that Wikipedia article on Landor, I wonder whether Emerson didn’t tone him down and smooth him out in his description nevertheless! It seems that Landor was quite a prickly and capricious character. A couple of things struck me, one was that writers back then wrote in so many different formats and this was considered quite okay. The other is that Landor seems to be known for his big sense of humour, which doesn’t seem to be something Emerson mentions at all. Is this the kind of thing that would fall below his radar, do you think?
Praising his sentences might seem like faint praise for a friend, but looking back on the essay and the person now, the sentences are probably the thing that would interest a person about Landor the most — people might get curious about this unknown person who wrote well. To be compared to Socrates (or Plato, or whatever) is pretty high praise!
Landor was a human thornbush – Litlove is right. In fairness to Emerson, some of Landor’s most difficult behavior came later in his life – he became more prickly as he got older.
Emerson was wrong about Goethe’s poetry, and here he sounds wrong, but is not. Landor belongs in the company of Thomas Hardy and a few others, poets who did their best work in their old age. Most of Landor’s best poems were written after Emerson’s essay.
Landor’s “Imaginary Conversations” were hard going for me. Some were clear and even funny, but many were very obscure. An annotated selection would be a big help.
But his best poetry – the Ianthe poems, for example – are light and easy, humorous and wry.
Wow!
To see you mentioning Walter Savage Landor.
Five of my favorite lines EVER, are his, and they are these:
Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak
Four not exempt from pride some future day.
Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek,
Over my open volume you will say,
‘This man loved me’ — then rise and trip away.
How gorgeous is that?
I have loved it a long while.
When I grow up [please, no one hold your breath, I know not CPR...] I want to write like that!
Litlove, Emerson did probably tone Landor down a bit. He does mention Landor’s sense of humor but doesn’t make much of it. And what n interesting point you raise about writers back then being able to write in so many different formats. That doesn’t happen much these days and when it does it is unusual. I wonder when and why that changed?
Dorothy, good sentences are important aren’t they?. They are what build the whole and create the final impression. And if someone wanted to compare me to Socrates, I think I’d be okay with that
Amateur Reader, thanks for your insightful comment. Emerson mentions Imaginary Conversations in the essay and I suppose at the time that is what he thought Landor would be best known for. I will have to look up his Ianthe poems.
Cipriano, those are beautiful lines. Now I am really going to have to read some Landor. And to think I had never heard of him until I read the Emerson essay.