Landor's Life - Page 2

through
his biographer's exposition), it needs not to have known himself, to
find a deep interest in these pages. More or less of their warning
is in every conscience; and some admiration of a fine genius, and of
a great, wild, generous nature, incapable of mean self-extenuation
or dissimulation--if unhappily incapable of self-repression too--
should be in every breast. "There may be still living many
persons", Walter Landor's brother, Robert, writes to Mr. Forster of
this book, "who would contradict any narrative of yours in which the
best qualities were remembered, the worst forgotten." Mr. Forster's
comment is: "I had not waited for this appeal to resolve, that, if
this memoir were written at all, it should contain, as far as might
lie within my power, a fair statement of the truth". And this
eloquent passage of truth immediately follows: "Few of his
infirmities are without something kindly or generous about them; and
we are not long in discovering there is nothing so wildly incredible
that he will not himself in perfect good faith believe. When he
published his first book of poems on quitting Oxford, the profits
were to be reserved for a distressed clergyman. When he published
his Latin poems, the poor of Leipzig were to have the sum they
realised. When his comedy was ready to be acted, a Spaniard who had
sheltered him at Castro was to be made richer by it. When he
competed for the prize of the Academy of Stockholm, it was to go to
the poor of Sweden. If nobody got anything from any one of these
enterprises, the fault at all events was not his. With his
extraordinary power of forgetting disappointments, he was prepared
at each successive failure to start afresh, as if each had been a
triumph. I shall have to delineate this peculiarity as strongly in
the last half as in the first half of his life, and it was certainly
an amiable one. He was ready at all times to set aside, out of his
own possessions, something for somebody who might please him for the
time; and when frailties of temper and tongue are noted, this other
eccentricity should not be omitted. He desired eagerly the love as
well as the good opinion of those whom for the time he esteemed, and
no one was more affectionate while under such influences. It is not
a small virtue to feel such genuine pleasure, as he always did in
giving and receiving pleasure. His generosity, too, was bestowed
chiefly on those who could make small acknowledgment in thanks and
no return in kind."

Some of his earlier contemporaries may have thought him a vain man.
Most assuredly he was not, in the common acceptation of the term. A
vain man has little or no admiration to bestow upon competitors.
Landor had an