'We Moderns Are But Slovens in Composition'

To Sir William Jones (1746-94), the Anglo-Welsh philologist, we owe the word Indo-European. He noted similarities among Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and suggested they share a common root. Here is Walter Savage Landor in an 1809 letter to Robert Southey:

“I have read everything Oriental I could lay my hands on, and everything good may be comprised in thirty or forty lines. There is a prodigious deal of puckering and flouncing and spangles, but nothing fresh, nothing graceful, nothing standing straight upwards or moving straight forwards on its feet.”

Ignorance of the subject at hand never slowed down Landor. If you are sufficiently familiar with his work in poetry and prose, you know he’s just warming up:

“I would rather have written the worst page in the Odyssea than all the stuff Sir William Jones makes such a pother and palaver on; yet what volumes would it fill! what libraries would it suffocate! God forbid that I should ever be drowned in any of these butts of malmsey! It is better to describe a girl getting a tumble over a skipping-rope made of a wreath of flowers.”

Landor is one of the masterful practitioners of invective in our language, up there with Swift, Carlyle and Mencken. Can you think of a major writer less fashionable, less amenable to acceptable thought in 2020? Nor can I. He belongs to that elite class who, even when we vehemently object to their message, we wish to celebrate their medium. His frequent unfairness is exhilarating. His words are vividly Shakespearean. Here is a brief selection from Landor’s Imaginary Conversations that I copied several years ago into a commonplace book:

“A word of honour is but the gaseous and volatile part of honour, which would blow up a true Frenchman if he tried to retain it within him.”

“This impudicity seems to have always been a characteristic of the Italian race.”

“. . . a loosish man and slippery in foul proclivities.”

“Your pediculous [OED: “lice-infested”] friars and parti-coloured bald-coot priests.”

“Milton shrivelled up the lips of his revilers by the austerity of his scorn.”

“It must be conceded that we moderns are but slovens in composition.”

“At first we were tickled, at last we were triturated [OED: “to reduce to fine particles or powder by rubbing, bruising, pounding, crushing, or grinding”].

“The smoky, verminous, unconcocted doctrine of passive obedience.”

And this, in a celebratory mode, quoted by John Forster in his biography of Landor (1869): “I am reading once more the work I have read oftener than any other prose work in our language [Swift’s Tale of a Tub]. I cannot bring to my recollection the number of copies I have given away, chiefly to young Catholic ladies. I really believe I converted one by it unintentionally. What a writer! not the most imaginative or the most simple, not Bacon or Goldsmith, had the power of saying more forcibly or completely whatever he meant to say!”

And here is Landor on another of his enthusiasms among earlier English writers:

“The grandest writer of late ages

Who wrapt Rome up in golden pages,

Whom scarcely Livius equal’d, Gibbon,

Died without star or cross or ribbon.”

Landor was born on January 30, 1775, and died on this date, September 17, in 1864.