*

Giulio, out of which one or two brief extracts will not be inappropriate here, as well to justify what Southey built upon it, as for the light it throws upon the other work its author then was busy with.

It has been said of the Imaginary Conversations that it is never possible to read them without feeling that whatever may be their truth to the circumstances and times in which their supposed speakers lived, they are still more true to Landor himself; that we always feel it is he who is speaking; and that he has merely chosen characters whom he considered suitable to develop particular phases of his own mind. There is something in this, but it is far from expressing on the particular point all that requires to be said. If the conversations had been only this, they would not have differed in result from the many similar undertakings by writers of that and the preceding century. Their distinction and their success was the combination with the intense individuality to which I have alluded at the opening of this section of some of the subtlest arts of the dramatist and of the highest poetical imagination. So calm a judgment as Julius Hare's found creations in them comparable only to Sophocles or Shakespeare:† and to so keen a criticism as Hazlitt's it appeared that the historical figures they evoked were transfused with nothing short of the very truth and spirit of history itself. Applied to some few of the conversations neither praise is in excess; and even where, as in by far the greater number, that is said from time to time which the speaker in life would not be likely to have said or to have been in the position to say, the man may thus be forgotten, but the character remains. True or false, the character conceived by Landor is in the forms of thought and speech there still. The dramatic con

ditions continue to be observed. Landor may be discoverable where we ought to be conscious only of Cicero, but it is in a difference between the fact as known to us and the conception formed of it, not in any falsehood to that conception or in any merely personal intrusion. If it had been otherwise, the defect would have shown itself in his poetical as in his prose conversations; and it is to exhibit the same spirit animating both that I now speak of the scenes of Ferrante and Giulio. They are not more perfect than those which accompanied them; but in a brief space they illustrate with surprising force Landor's management of a dialogue bringing the extremes of passion and tenderness into play.

The first scene is in a cathedral, the second in a prison; and the position of the persons introduced in a few words is this. The Duke Alfonso and his brother the cardinal have two brothers by their father's side, Ferrante and Giulio, whom they refuse to acknowledge. The duke is jealous of Ferrante's power over his subjects, and the cardinal of his influence over the girl beloved by his eminence him

*See ante, pp. 188, 184.

t London Magazine, IX. 523, 588, 539.
+ Edinburgh Review, March, 1824.

self. The prince is a tyrant of the approved type of medieval Italy, and the priest very exactly foreshadows Victor Hugo's famous archdeacon. The first scene shows him in the cathedral, maddened by the rejection of his love.

"Surely no air is stirring; every step

Tires me; the columns shake, the ceiling fleets,
The floor beneath me slopes, the altar rises.
Stay! here she stept: what grace! what harmony!
It seemed that every accent, every note
Of all the choral music, breathed from her:
From her celestial airiness of form

I could have fancied purer light descended.
Between the pillars, close and wearying,
I watcht her as she went: I had rusht on;
It was too late; yet when I stopt, I thought
I stopt full soon: I cried, Is she not there?
She had been: I had seen her shadow burst
The sunbeam as she parted: a strange sound,
A sound that stupefied and not aroused me,
Filled all my senses: such was never felt
Save when the sword-girt Angel struck the gate,
And Paradise wailed loud and closed forever."

His passion in all its forms only repels its object.

Seeing her weep

after leaving Ferrante, he builds upon it a kind of hope which she at once destroys, comparing him with the brother that she loves.

"All tears are not for sorrow: many swell
In the warm depths of gratitude and bliss;
But precious over all are those that hang
And tremble at the tale of generous deeds.
These he relates when he might talk, as you do,
Of passion: but he sees my heart, he finds

What fragrance most refreshes it.

How high,

O Heaven! must that man be, who loves, and who
Would still raise others higher than himself

To interest his beloved!

All my soul

Is but one drop from his, and into his

Falls, as earth's dew falls into earth again."

What follows is the dialogue in prison to which I have more especially referred, and in which is expressed what the Italian legend dryly tells us, that the cardinal obtained an order from the duke to deprive Ferrante of his eyes because the girl beloved by his eminence had praised the beauty of them. Ferrante had been imprisoned for sanctioning some popular tumult, and his brother Giulio had come to solace him, when the cardinal brother enters suddenly, and after bitter words of reproach and defiance thrusts a paper upon Giulio and goes. Ferrante, ignorant that this paper contains the sentence depriving him of sight, wonders to see Giulio, after glancing at it, rush round" the wide light chamber" in uncontrollable agony.

"Ferrante. O my true brother Giulio! why thus hang
Around my neck and pour forth prayers for me?

Where there are priests and kinsmen such as ours,
God hears not, nor is heard. I am prepared

For death.

Giulio. Ah! worse than death may come upon you,
Unless Heaven interpose.

Ferrante.

I know the worst,

And bear one comfort in my breast that fire

And steel can ne'er force from it: she I love

Will not be his, but die as she hath lived.

Doubt you? that thus you shake the head and sigh.
Giulio. Far other doubt was mine: even this shall cease.
Ferrante. Speak of it.

Giulio.

Ferrante.

I must: God pardon me!

Speak on.

Giulio. Have we not dwelt in friendship from our birth,
Told the same courtier the same tale of joy,

And pointed where life's earliest thorn had pierced
Amid the sports of boyhood, ere the heart

Had aught of bitter or unsound within?
Ferrante. We have indeed.

Giulio.

Has my advice been ill?

Ferrante. Too often ill-observed, but always good.

Giulio. Brother, my words are not what better men
Would speak to you; and yet my love, I think,

Must be more warm than theirs can ever be.

Ferrante. Brother's, friend's, father's, when was it like yours?
Giulio. Which of them ever said what I shall say?

Ferrante. Speak; my desires are kindled, my fears quencht.
Giulio. Do not delay to die, lest crueller

Than common death befall you."

The intensity of anguish in those quiet words could not be surpassed. For dramatic language and expression, in the sense formerly contrasted with stage dialogue, the scene is indeed a masterpiece. Ferrante cannot yet take in the horrible truth. But gradually as it dawns upon him he loses faith in all things, — in everything but her for whose love he is to suffer.

Why break with vehement words such sweet illusion?
For were there naught above but empty air,

Naught but the clear blue sky where birds delight,
Soaring o'er myriad worlds of living dust
That roll in columns round the noontide ray,
Your heart would faint amid such solitude,
Would shrink in such vacuity: that heart
(Ferrante! can you hide its wants from me?)
Rises and looks around and calls aloud

For some kind Being, some consoling bosom,
Whereon to place its sorrows, and to rest.

Ferrante. O, that was here . . I cannot look beyond."

A gleam of hope then suddenly rises. The discontent of the people at Ferrante's imprisonment being heard in a clamor beneath the dungeon window, Giulio passionately urges his brother to show himself to his friends; but the other, knowing that failure will destroy both, invents a reason to evade the risk of sacrificing his brother. The scene closes as the lights approach by which the sentence is to be executed; and, from the brother whose life has been one act of love for him, Ferrante receives the dagger with which he stabs him

* See ante, pp. 162, 163.

1815-21.

self. No stage directions are wanted here. Everything is visible to us, as well of the outward form and movement of the speakers as of the soul that throbs and burns beneath.

"Giulio. Hark! hear you not the people? to the window! They shout and clap their hands when first they meet you After short absence; what shall they do now?

Up! seize the moment; show yourself.

Ferrante.
Stay, Giulio!
Draw me not thither; speak not of my wrongs;
I would await but not arouse their vengeance,
And would deserve but court not their applause.
Little of good shall good men hope from them,
Nothing shall wiser.

[Aside]

O, were he away!

But if I fail, he must die too, being here.

Giulio. Let me call out: they are below the grate;
They would deliver you: try this one chance.

Obdurate! would you hold me down? They 're gone!
Ferrante. Giulio, for shame! weep not, or here I stay
And let vile hands deform me.

Giulio.

They shall never.
Ferrante. What smoke arises? are there torches under?
Surely the crowd has passed: 't is from the stairs.

Giulio. Anticipate the blow.

Ferrante.

One more must grieve!

And will she grieve like you, too tender Giulio!

Turn not away the head, the hand. What hold you?
Give, give it to me. 'Tis keen. They call you forth.
Tell her.. no, say not we shall meet again,

For tears flow always faster at those words

May the thought come, but gently, like a dream!"

As a matter of mere literary skill this dialogue deserves careful study. Here no action requires to be written in, no stage direction to be given, no index or finger-post to be set up, for what the reader seems actually to see with his eyes even before the pain of it touches his heart. The marvel is that a man who could write in this way should have lived considerably beyond the term of middle age without having won for himself any name or reputation in a world to whose good opinion he never was indifferent, even when loudest in professing not to care for it. Some will also think it perhaps the greater marvel that he was now to succeed after failure during all those years, yet without abatement in the smallest particular of the wilfulness, the eccentricity, or the impatience which before had made success so difficult. The scene we have quoted may help us to a brief explanation. One obvious advantage of his new undertaking was, that, avoiding further competition on a ground now seized and held in absolute possession by Byron, it was to be written in prose; but another and greater consisted in the fact, that while the dialogue form not only left him scope for humors indulged so long as to have become part of his nature, but brought under some kind of discipline both the strength and weakness that were part of his genius, the general design was at the same time such as to display in their most perfect development his choicest accomplishments as a master of style, and his most refined power as a dramatic writer. His five-act dramas

had been dialogues, but his dialogues were to be one-act dramas ; and, placed in future to a certain extent under dramatic conditions, there was to be hereafter some purpose in even the most violent of the caprices by which he had abused his strength, and in the idlest of the paradoxes on which he had wasted it. For whatever he had yet to say, he was to get appropriate utterance at last; his mind was to find a settled place in which it might rest and expatiate; and his life was not to be a failure altogether.

"I shall rejoice to see your Dialogues," wrote Southey to him in the letter (May, 1822) following that just quoted. "Mine are consecutive, and will have nothing of that dramatic variety of which you will make the most. My plan grew out of Boethius, though it has since been so modified that the origin would not be suspected. The personage who visits me is Sir Thomas More, as one who recognizes in me some dis-pathies, but more points of agreement. This age is as climacteric as that in which he lived; and you see what a canvas I have taken, if I can but fill up the sketch." It is an ill canvas for dialogue which takes a road so narrow, "where but one goes abreast"; and such was Southey's, as it had been Hurd's and Lyttelton's in similar books; mere monologues cut up into short sentences uttered with equal appropriateness by A and B; the main object being to recommend particular systems or lines of thought, special opinions, or social changes. Far different was Landor's. His plan had taken a range as wide as life and history. All the leading shapes of the past, the most familiar and the most august, were to be called up again. Modes of thinking the most various and events the most distant, all that had made the greatness or the littleness of mankind, were proposed for his theme. Beside the fires of the present, the ashes of the past were to be rekindled, and to shoot again into warmth and brightness. The scene was to be shifting as life, but continuous as time. Over it were to pass successions of statesmen, lawyers, and churchmen; wits and men of letters; party men, soldiers, and kings; the most tender, delicate, and noble women; figures fresh from the schools of Athens and the courts of Rome; philosophers philosophizing and politicians discussing questions of state; poets talking of poetry, men of the world of matters worldly, and English, Italians, or French of their respective literatures and manners.* The very extent of such a design, if success were to be obtained at all, was a security for its fair execution. With a stage so spread before him, whether his immediate purpose were expression of opinion or representation of character, he could hardly help breaking through the "circumscription and confine" of his own small round of likings and dislikings. His plan compelled it; and what else it exacted no man living could have supplied so well. The requisites for it were such as no other existing writer

If I have here used occasionally an expression to be found in a paper in the Edinburgh Review on Landor's collected works, this may perhaps be forgiven, as I wrote that paper.