Landor. Unhappily, both he and Dryden saw Nature from between the houses of Fleet Street. If ever there was a poet who knew her well, and described her in all her loveliness, it was Milton. In the Paradise Lost how profuse in his descriptions, as became the time and place! In the Allegro and Penseroso how exquisite and select!

Johnson asks, "What Englishman can take delight in transcribing passages which, if they lessen the reputation of Milton, diminish in some degree the honour of our country!" I hope the honour of our country will always rest on truth and justice. It is not by concealing what is wrong that anything right can be accomplished. There is no pleasure in transcribing such passages; but there is great utility. Inferior writers exercise no interest, attract no notice, and serve no purpose. Johnson has himself done great good by exposing great faults in great authors. His criticism on Milton's highest work is the most valuable of all his writings. He seldom is erroneous in his censures; but he never is sufficiently excited to admiration of what is purest and highest in poetry. He has this in common with common minds (from which, however, his own is otherwise far remote), to be pleased with what is nearly on a level with him, and to drink as contentedly a heady beverage, with its discoloured froth, as what is of the best vintage. He is morbid, not only in his weakness, but in his strength. There is much to pardon, much to pity, much to respect, and no little to admire, in him.

After I have been reading the Paradise Lost, I can take up no other poet with satisfaction. I seem to have left the music of Handel for the music of the streets, or at best for drums and fifes. Although in Shakspeare there are occasional bursts of harmony no less sublime, yet if there were many such in continuation, it would be hurtful, not only in comedy, but also in tragedy. The greater part should be equable and conversational. For if the excitement were the same at the beginning, the middle, and the end; if consequently (as must be the case) the language and versification were equally elevated throughout, any long poem would be a bad one, and, worst of all, a drama. In our English heroic verse, such as Milton has composed it, there is a much greater variety of feet, of movement,

of musical notes and bars, than in the Greek heroic; and the final sounds are incomparably more diversified. My predilection in youth was on the side of Homer; for I had read the Iliad twice, and the Odyssea once, before the Paradise Lost. Averse as I am to everything relating to theology, and especially to the view of it thrown open by this poem, I recur to it incessantly as the noblest specimen in the world of eloquence, harmony, and genius.

Southey. Learned and sensible men are of opinion that the Paradise Lost should have ended with the words, "Providence their guide." It might very well have ended there; but we are unwilling to lose sight all at once of our first parents. Only one more glimpse is allowed us: we are thankful for it. We have seen the natural tears they dropped; we have seen that they wiped them soon. And why was it? Not because the world was all before them; but because there still remained for them, under the guidance of Providence, not indeed the delights of Paradise, now lost for ever, but the genial clime and calm repose of Eden.

Landor. It has been the practice in late years to supplant one dynasty by another, political and poetical. Within our own memory, no man had ever existed who preferred Lucretius on the whole to Virgil, or Dante to Homer. But the great Florentine, in these days, is extolled high above the Grecian and Milton. Few, I believe, have studied him more attentively or with more delight than I have; but, beside the prodigious disproportion of the bad to the good, there are fundamental defects which there are not in either of the other two. In the Divina Commedia the characters are without any bond of union, any field of action, any definite aim. There is no central light above the Bolge; and we are chilled in Paradise even at the sight of Beatrice.

1

Southey. Some poetical Perillus 2 must surely have invented the terza rima. I feel in reading it as a schoolboy feels when he is beaten over the head with a bolster.

Landor. We shall hardly be in time for dinner. What should

1 The Male Bolge, or ten "evil pouches" or cavities of the eighth circle of the Inferno. 2 Perillus was reputed to have designed the brazen bull with which the ancient tyrant Phalaris tortured his victims.

we have been if we had repeated with just eulogies all the noble things in the poem we have been reading?

Southey. They would never have weaned you from the Mighty Mother who placed her turreted crown on the head of Shakespeare.

Landor. A rib of Shakespeare would have made a Milton: the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since. . . .

Southey. Shakespeare, whom you not only prefer to every other poet, but think he contains more poetry and more wisdom than all the rest united, is surely less grand in his designs than several.

Landor. To the eye. But Othello was loftier than the citadel of Troy; and what a Paradise fell before him! Let us descend; for from Othello we must descend, whatever road we take; let us look at Julius Cæsar. No man ever overcame such difficulties, or produced by his life and death such a change in the world we inhabit. But that also is a grand design which displays the interior workings of the world within us, and where we see the imperishable and unalterable passions depicted al fresco on a lofty dome. Our other dramatists painted only on the shambles, and represented what they found there, — blood and garbage. We leave them a few paces behind us, and step over the gutter into the green-market. There are, however, men rising up among us, endowed with exquisiteness of taste and intensity of thought. At no time have there been so many who write well in so many ways..

Southey. Passing Milton's oversights, we next notice his t systematic defects.1 Fondness for Euripides made him too didactic when action was required. Perhaps the French drama kept him in countenance, although he seems to have paid little attention to it, comparatively.

Landor. The French drama contains some of the finest didactic poetry in the world, and is peculiarly adapted both to direct the reason and to control the passions. It is a welllighted saloon of graceful eloquence, where the sword-knot is appended by the hand of Beauty, and where the snuff-box is 1 The subject is now the Samson Agonistes.

composed of such brilliants as, after a peace or treaty, kings bestow on diplomatists. Whenever I read a French Alexandrine, I fancy I receive a box on the ear in the middle of it, and another at the end, sufficient, if not to pain, to weary me intolerably, and to make the book drop out of my hand. Molière and La Fontaine can alone by their homeopathy revive me. Such as the power of united wit and wisdom in ages the most desperate! These men, with Montaigne and Charron, will survive existing customs, and probably existing creeds. . . .

...

Southey. You were remarking that our poet paid little attention to the French drama. Indeed, in his preface he takes no notice of it whatsoever, not even as regards the plot, in which consists its chief excellence, or perhaps I should say rather its superiority. He holds the opinion that "a plot, whether intricate or explicit, is nothing but such economy or disposition of the fable as may stand best with verisimilitude and decorum." Surely the French tragedians have observed this doctrine attentively.

Landor. It has rarely happened that dramatic events have followed one another in their natural order. The most remarkable instance of it is in the King Edipus of Sophocles. But Racine is in general the most skilful of the tragedians, with little energy and less invention. I wish Milton had abstained from calling "Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides the three tragic poets unequaled yet by any," because it may leave a suspicion that he fancied he, essentially undramatic, could equal them, and had now done it; and because it exhibits him as a detractor from Shakespeare. I am as sorry to find him in this condition as I should have been to find him in a fit of the gout, or treading on a nail with naked foot in his blindness.

Southey. Unfortunately, it is impossible to exculpate him, for you must have remarked where, a few sentences above, are these expressions: "This is mentioned to vindicate from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many it undergoes at this day, with other common interludes; happening through the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or intermixing trivial and vulgar persons, which, by all judicious, hath been counted absurd

and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people."

Landor. It may be questioned whether the people in the reign of Elizabeth, or indeed the queen herself, would have been contented with a drama without a smack of the indecent or the ludicrous. They had alike been accustomed to scenes of ribaldry and of bloodshed; and the palace opened on one wing to the brothel, on the other to the shambles. The clowns of Shakespeare are still admired by not the vulgar only.

Southey. The more the pity. Let them appear in their proper places. But a picture by Morland or Frank Hals ought never to break a series of frescoes by the hand of Raphael, or of senatorial portraits animated by the sun of Titian. There is much to be regretted in, and (since we are alone I will say it) a little which might without loss or injury be rejected from, the treasury of Shakespeare.

Landor. It is difficult to sweep away anything and not to sweep away gold-dust with it; but viler dust lies thick in some places. The grave Milton, too, has cobwebs hanging on his workshop, which a high broom, in a steady hand, may reach without doing mischief. But let children and short men, and unwary ones, stand out of the way. . . .

PERICLES AND ASPASIA

1836

[The imaginary letters of this collection, like the Conversations, are frequently unfaithful to actual history, but seek to represent. the spirit of the great age of Pericles. They are supposed to pass between him, Aspasia, and their friends, during the period about 440-429 B.C. The letters here included represent only the closing days of Pericles' life; his final letter is Landor's masterpiece, and one of the noblest specimens of modern prose.]

CLXXXV. ASPASIA TO CLEONE

I HAVE been exhorting Pericles to leave Attica for a while, and to enjoy with me the pleasures of retirement in the little isle of Tenos. He listened to my entreaty with his usual attention and interest, and soon began to expatiate on the charms,