Crabb Robinson and Savage Landor. 769 he has kept a careful and exhaustive record of them. The plan of the table was a serious concern with Mr Robinson; the choice selection of a party was regarded as something actually amounting to art. We are not informed of the dishes on each occasion, and that is a pity; but we can give some exquisite specimens of Mr Robinson's skilled harmonising of individualities. Let the reader read with care; in spirit he, too, may touch the hand that had touched the hand of Goethe, and Wieland, and Tieck, and Madame de Stael, of Wordsworth and Charles Lamb :"June 19. 1861.-At my dinner party to-day we were placed as follows: Rev. J. J. Tayler. H. C. R. Boxall. Rev. D. Coleridge. Rev. James Martineau. George Street. Rev. F. Maurice. Richard Hutton. Edwin Field. The conversation was lively, and there was only one who, by talking more than others, was what Kant calles a tyrant in table talk. [Does Mr Crabb Robinson mean himself, or did he for once meet with his match-a sour(er) crab ?] "Note.-In the later years of his life, H. C. R. invited friends on Sunday morning to breakfasts, and had occasional dinner parties, which were remarkably successful. The diary has generally a little plan of the table and the place occupied by each guest. Two or three of these will give the best idea of the persons he called to gather round his table : "There is among H. C. R.'s papers a little book in which are put down the names of Die Eingeladenen' (the invited of the years 1859-61, and 1862)." VOL. XVIII.—NO. LXX. H The awards of fortune have been held capricious from of old. What a solace it must be to the favoured guests of Mr Robinson who are not named here, to know, that their association with him has not passed without record, or lost all chance of immortality! There is hope for them too. The world may yet know them as having breakfasted with Crabb Robinson. One very peculiar impression a careful perusal of the Diary produced upon us. It seemed to us we were in a perpetual round of great visits, without being privileged to witness anything like the necessary interludes of prosaic and commonplace occurrences. Such would have been a rare relief. We weary for some commonplace, healthy incident. It is as if, instead of having plain bread on any occasion, delicate sugar bread were constantly served up to us, till, in place of crying with Oliver Twist for "more," we were inclined to turn away in satiety, and to long for the coarsest crumbs from the tables of the poor and ignorant. Anything becomes a dainty by growing rare; and some relief from the round of visits to famous people (or people cursed with the hunger for greatness), to lecture rooms, operas, theatres, &c., &c., would have been grateful even had it been in the form of an account of the cutting of Mr Crabb Robinson's corns, or the exact manner in which he liked his chop cooked, and the difficulty he had in getting it done to an exact turn. We cannot, of course, very well judge on this point, and can neither praise nor blame Dr Sadler for the manner in which he has done his work. But we value at its proper worth the assurance in the preface (p. viii.), that "the omitted portions refer to matters of private life"; and think that some of these could not but have had a value in giving relief to these oppressively over-scented flowers; and more especially as the omitted portions must have been very private indeed, and therefore the more likely to supply the desideratum we deplore, in that Dr Sadler quite seriously prints the following, and, moreover, opens a volume with it : This morning I went, imme "January 9. 1816.-(At Norwich.) diately after breakfast, to a Jew dentist, C- who put in a natural tooth in place of the one I swallowed yesterday. He assured me it came from Waterloo, and promised me it should outlast twelve artificial teeth." A few more paragraphs like this would have given precisely that balance, that happy turn, which would have almost made the work perfect. But Dr Sadler, with a reticence as delicate as it is rare, comforts us with the assurance, that the day may yet come when this omitted private matter may be printed. We have nearly 1650 pages of octavo already-a considerable stroke of reading, whatever may be said of the writing or the editing, and a couple of hundred pages more would have made a valuable addition. Crabb Robinson and Savage Landor. 771 With regard to all that concerns religious thought or feeling, we find exactly the same result as elsewhere. There is, in Mr Robinson's case, an affectation of width, of surface sympathy, without thorough conviction, or the earnest realisation of truth of any kind whatever. A man possessed with an idea, for which he would fight to the death, claims some respect, however erroneous his conceptions of truth may be. But the man who toys with the awfulest problems, who makes of his religion but a sort of æsthetic kaleidoscope, which he himself can turn round and round, taking occasional gratifying peeps, and can even justify this peep-peeping by a sort of mock modest self-depreciation-seems to us very far from deserving to be held up as an exemplar by consecrated preachers of the_gospel.* Between Mr Crabb Robinson and Walter Savage Landor there is this difference, that the one consciously contemplates and examines all forms of truth and belief, and arrogates to himself the right of a sort of eclectic æsthetic selection; whilst the other self-consciously ignores the claims of all and sundry alike upon heart and conscience, and arrogates a sort of right to know nothing. Mr Crabb Robinson admires Edward Irving very much, but he cannot understand why the Scotch preacher should not immediately fraternise with Charles Lamb, and enjoy his punning. To use a slang phrase, he must even "take stock" of his religion:"That which he [Irving] calls religion and the gospel, is a something I have a repugnance to. But his eloquence is captivating,. . and his manner is improved. He is less theatrical than he was a year ago." Then poor William Law and Jacob Böhme must have a turn (over)! "I also bought Law's 'Jacob Böhme' for £1, 7s., though 4 vols. 4to., still a foolish purchase, for what have I to do with mystical devotion, who am in vain striving to gain a taste for a more rational religion." Neither evangelicalism, nor mysticism, nor rationalism can satisfy Mr Robinson's spirit; but, of course, his happy soul finds some good in all of them. It was different with Mr Landor. He ignored religion, and everything that pertained to it. He did not even see how intimately it associates itself with all deepest and most vital things, upholding and purifying art from those disintegrating influences which speedily overtake all the merely prosaic and useful forms of production. In regard to the relations of religion and art, Wordsworth seems to have been so disgusted at Landor's sensualistic views, that he took occasion to write him on the subject. These paragraphs from Mr Forster's volumes give us an indirect but valuable glimpse into Landor's vacant heart :— * Vide Mr Maurice in Macmillan's Magazine for August. "All religions," writes Wordsworth to Landor, "owe their origin or reception to the wish of the human heart to supply in another state of existence the deficiences of this, and to carry still nearer to perfection what we admire in our present condition; so that there must be many modes of expression arising out of this coincidence, or rather identity, of feeling, common to all mythologies; and under this observation I should shelter the phrase [one of the phrases in Laodamia'] from your censure. But I may be wrong in the particular case, though certainly not in the general principle." "By this reasoning," Mr Forster adds, "Wordsworth is farther led to a remark of Landor's, in a letter received from him, that he was disgusted with all books that treat of religion. He was afraid it was a bad sign in himself, Wordsworth says, that he had little relish for any other. Even in poetry it was the imagination only-namely, that which is conversant with, or turns upon infinity-that powerfully affected him. Perhaps I ought to explain. I meant to say, that unless in those passages where things are lost in each other, and limits vanish, and aspirations are raised, I read with something too much like indifference.' But all great poets were, in this view, powerful religionists; and therefore, among many literary pleasures lost to Wordsworth, he had not yet to lament over that of verse as departed.” Mr Forster deserves some credit and some forbearance for the disinterestedness of a friendship which could lead him to perform, with such devotion and rare literary skill, a biography of such voluminous proportions. It amounts to 1128 closely printed pages. He has done what he could to galvanise into fresh life, writings which evidently have excited his honest admiration and enthusiasm, but which, we rejoice to think, will never come closely home to the hearts and sympathies of the British people. Evidently, he had more hope of attracting students to Landor's writings than of leading them, with himself, to bow in reverence before the man. His purpose would have been better served had he made a single volume of judicious extracts. Mr Forster is a masterly writer; but he shews himself terribly infected with the morbid self-consciousness we deplore so deeply in his paragon; and we cannot say his heavy (materially we mean, of course) volumes are likely to commend themselves to the mass. The confined air of a clique is about them, after all; and where that elevation of sentiment, that unconscious simplicity of character, and that devotedness of will and purpose, which so enter into everything heroic, is wanting-all is awanting; and humanity refuses to bow down, however high the intellect, however rare and original the powers. A correctness, a grace, a studied elegance and repose of style, which might, at the first blush, be mistaken for the spontaneity of genius, cannot in fairness be denied to Landor; but this, though it may attract literary students and antiquarians, is but the garnishing of the grave-clothes, and the great "The Song"-A New Reading of its Plot. 773 hungering heart willingly leaves these at the tomb's mouth, and goes forth with swift feet, seeking for the spirit that is absent there. Landor is a writer with few faults; but what does he himself say, with an oblique, unconscious reference to the class to which he belongs? "La Fontaine, Catullus, and Sophocles are, perhaps, the writers who have fewest faults.. But there are pages in Shakespeare and Milton worth all the works of these" (ii. p. 421). Dash into one the sharp, graceful aptness of La Fontaine; the dainty elegance and artificiality of Catullus; and, for a third portion, give the cynical, incisive finality, the leering maliciousness and filthy abandon of Swift -and you have Landor, a master of his mother tongue, but without the beauty of character, or the sweetness of disposition, or the serene self-abnegation necessary to give that last sanctifying touch, which makes, for instance, the "Vicar" of Goldsmith so rare, so ever new, and so enduring. It can be in no respect gratifying to a man of any sensibility to be compelled, for the truth's sake, to write what may seem harsh things of the dead. But "Di mortuis nil nisi bonum" should, in these days of bulky memoir writing, and facile hero worship, and hurried reviewing, be read, "Di mortuis nil nisi VERUM. Mr Crabb Robinson and Mr Savage Landor were, in our idea, both destitute of the central element in true greatness; and therefore we have felt it due to ourselves and our readers to give our reasons for declining to homologate, even by our silence, the generally uttered verdict. "We speak as unto wise men; judge ye." ART. VI." The Song of Songs"-A New Reading of its THE Plot.* HE questions are almost innumerable which have been raised in connection with this book. Who was its author? Where was it written? In what age was it produced? What is its subject? Is it literal or allegorical? Is it inspired, or is it simply a song of human love, which has found its way by mistake into the canon of sacred Scripture ? Such * The writer of this article has, in his time, read not a few expositions of the "Song." Some of them he admires for their piety, others for their ingenuity, and others for their erudition, but he cannot say that in any of them he has found what he takes to be the real meaning and scope of the book. Whether the writer has been more successful in his attempt to unravel the story of the "Song," he must leave to others to say. |