Home Search Every Field Editorial Search Authors' Landor's Cleanness Responses By Adam Roberts (Oxford, 2014) 208 pp. Guidelines Reviewed by David Chandler on 2015-05-21. For Click here for a PDF version. Reviewers Click here to buy the book on Amazon. About Us Masthead Between 1927 and 1936, Chapman and Hall of London brought out the sixteen volumes of Walter Savage Landor's complete (well, more or less complete) prose and poetry in English as edited by T. Earle Welby and Stephen Wheeler Feedback respectively. As collected editions go, it is not very impressive, yet it remains a remarkable monument both to Landor's immense achievement and the critical recognition of that achievement in days gone by. In 1933, for example, T. S. Eliot acknowledged Landor as "one of the very finest poets of the first part of the nineteenth century" (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 79). But changing critical tastes have not been kind to him. Little new work has been done on Landor since the 1960s, and it is easy to find (though not excuse) graduate students specializing in Romanticism who have never even heard of him. Neither female nor gay nor plebian, not a dedicated poet like Wordsworth or Keats, not a dedicated philosopher like Coleridge, not a crowd-pleaser and molder of national ideology like Walter Scott, not a dandy and self- conscious celebrity like Byron, not a great essayist like Lamb or Hazlitt, not a good example of "the Romantic ideology," indeed not a typical Romantic nor yet a typical Victorian, but with a career straddling those standard periods, Landor has somehow fallen between all the critical stools that might have arrested his fall into comparative obscurity. Despite the critical neglect, it is hardly possible to open a random volume and random page of the Welby-Wheeler edition without being impressed by what one reads. There is a loftiness about Landor's writing, a magisterial sense of style, which can hardly be mistaken for any other author's. Though the style often distracts the reader from the content, Landor was a highly cultured, deeply read man whose writing is often interesting and sometimes profound. Any new study of him is very welcome, especially if it is likely to rehabilitate him, to stimulate people to read and study him, and in many ways this book comes across as just what is wanted. The publisher's blurb on the back cover states: The present study, the first for nearly half a century to address the whole of Landor's prodigious output over the seven decades of his writing life, in verse, prose, and drama, in English and Latin: from the brief lyrics by which (if at all) he is remembered today up to his idylls, tragedies, and epics; from his pamphlets and essays to historical novels like Pericles and Aspasia and the textual colossus of the Imaginary Conversations. Besides being an incomplete sentence (a point to which I shall return), this blurb makes the book sound grander than it actually is. Rather than "address[ing] the whole of Landor's prodigious output," this slim volume samples it. "[T]he textual colossus of the Imaginary Conversations," for example, is covered in a chapter of some thirty pages. Yet if Roberts has understandably chosen texts that best illustrate his central thesis, and on which he has clever things to say, his sampling is nonetheless intelligent and effective, giving a rounded view of Landor's achievement. Demonstrating Roberts's profound knowledge of his author, the book leaves us actually wishing that it were longer and that it covered more of Landor's writings. But perhaps, I hope, the sense that there is much more to be said will encourage other scholars to start saying it. Previous attempts to work up interest in Landor have tended to begin with a roll call of literary worthies who have acclaimed him in the past. Instead of doing this, or even paying much attention to earlier Landor criticism, Roberts launches his main thesis immediately and pursues it vigorously, and with little digression, through the course of his book. Landor's "classicism," Roberts argues, his constant pursuit of a timeless, noble style (he found it as easy to write in Latin as English), is bound up in complex ways with an ideology of cleanliness, of purity, that has all sorts of cultural, moral and political ramifications. At the same time, though, Landor's longing for the "clean" involves him in a constant struggle with what may loosely be called "dirt," and besides dirtying him, this struggle with dirt becomes a constituent part of his style and what might loosely be termed his "philosophy." In Roberts's reading, Landor couldn't just wish the dirt away, at least not without loss: at some level, Roberts contends, Landor recognized that "perfect purity is also a kind of death -- or to put it another way, that perfect purity is perfect loss; that desire is always a contaminated and self-contradictory [sic]" (7). Landor's texts are thus haunted by "dirt" that is both substantive and stylistic: with the specters of sex, violence and unruliness hovering around them, and with obscure, macaronic and heteroglossic language constantly threatening to obtrude. This masterful thesis not only reveals a great deal about Landor but also makes him extremely interesting. Indeed, Roberts argues in his epilogue that his approach makes Landor exemplarily Romantic, for the kind of dirt he grapples with also permeates Romanticism more widely. It is a well-earned conclusion. In general, Roberts comes across as a persuasive advocate for Landor. "At length and over time," Roberts states, he has found "that even the least promising of . [Landor's] works yields a variety of fascinating, even thrilling qualia under scrutiny" (9). This is well supported by many of Roberts's readings. As though to stress his impartiality, however, he comes down pretty hard on a few of Landor's writings, especially Andrea of Hungary (1839), which he considers the author's "worst" play (124), and the Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare (1834), which he curiously names a novel, "as it must be called" (144). But it is not a novel. Masquerading as a legal deposition taken at Shakespeare's trial for deer poaching on 19 September 1582 by one Ephraim Barnett, and presented complete with an "Editor's Preface" and mock- scholarly notes, it is primarily a spoof aimed at Shakespearean scholars. Its satirical thrust is not mentioned and I fear not recognized by Roberts, who refers to neither Ephraim Barnett nor the anonymous editor, and who leaves us to conclude that Landor seriously freighted this dullest of novels with a great many pedantic footnotes to his own poor jokes. The odd thing about this notion is that the Citation is singularly occupied with dirtying, for by representing the young Shakespeare as the irreverent and promiscuous poacher of Warwickshire folklore (Landor himself was a native of Warwickshire), it seeks to explode the pure, saintly, and conformist image of the Bard found in nineteenth-century biographies. It is worth pursuing this point a little further, for Roberts makes very heavy weather of the rather good jokes in the Citation by attempting to force them into his argument. At one point in Landor's text, for example, a witness against Shakespeare named Joseph Carnaby says, "We were still at some distance from the party, when of a sudden Euseby hung an --," whereupon Carnaby is reprimanded by Sir Thomas Lucy, Shakespeare's legendary prosecutor, for using "such rude phrases" (Complete Works 10: 283-84). The humor here is obviously akin to that delightful moment in The Lion King when Pumbaa is told not to say the word "farted" "in front of the kids" even though most of the "kids" in the audience are expected to know he was about to say it. But could Landor expect his readers to know the old expression "hung an arse"? Since he was evidently not sure, he introduced a second joke by adding-- in a footnote -- that the omitted word was "unintelligible" though "[t]hat it was rough and outlandish is apparent from the reprimand of Sir Thomas." Thus, to gently satirize the culture that had made Thomas Bowdler's Family Shakespeare a bestseller, Landor mimics the sort of prudish scholar who had taken exception to the traditional stories about Shakespeare. Not recognizing the satire, Roberts comments, with some exasperation: Landor can't help trampling all over his own joke, although here the motive is presumably one of propriety. The omitted word is, of course, 'arse' ('to hang an arse', 'to hesitate or hold back, to be reluctant or tardy; to hang back' [OED]; though it would require an improbably sheltered upbringing in 1834, never mind 1582, to find the word arse 'unintelligible'. (146) Well! Understanding the word "arse" and knowing Carnaby was about to say it are obviously different things, just as understanding the word "farted" and knowing Pumbaa was about to say it are different things; and the joke requires that the word be withheld. Roberts's "of course" is singularly unconvincing, even to himself, for he seems to need the authority of the OED. But this is where his failure to understand and explain the genre of the Citation is critical. Roberts would have it that Landor couldn't write the word "arse" in a "novel" because of his sense of "propriety," even though his subversive attraction to dirt led him to awkwardly ghost it in before, as one might say, "covering it." Yet the point of the joke, in so far as it has one, is that the values of the sanctimonious Sir Thomas Lucy, Shakespeare's enemy, have been institutionalized in modern Britain, not least by Shakespeare scholars.