'Cordial Old Man!'

“Landor, like Lamb, was just strange enough to accommodate Hazlitt’s own oddness, and the two became friends, regardless of Hazlitt’s criticism.”

 

Few writers can be judged genuinely eccentric or "difficult" based solely on the writing they leave us. Literary history tends to whitewash peculiarities or romanticize them, and the virtues of the work blind us to the human weirdness. We turn to their contemporaries for uncensored insights.

 

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), best remembered for his diary, was one of those elusive figures known for knowing others, a catalyst who triggered chemical reactions between more prominent writers. Robinson took Walter Savage Landor to meet Charles Lamb in Enfield on September 28, 1832. This was risky. Landor was a hot-headed man, easily offended, who loved to argue and hold a grudge. He was visiting his home country from Fiesole, a village near Florence, Italy, where he had been living since 1821. Lamb was usually benign, depending on how much alcohol he had consumed. Carlyle judged him “in some considerable degree insane. . . . Poor England where such a despicable abortion is named genius!”

 

The passage quoted at the top is from Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb (Yale University Press, 2022) by Eric G. Wilson, who writes: “One of the few bright spots in Lamb’s final years was meeting Walter Savage Landor.” Wilson tells us Hazlitt, another hothead, had met Landor in Italy in 1825 and praised Imaginary Conversations, even though he judged the work “spoiled and rendered abortive throughout by an utter want to temper, of self-knowledge and decorum.” Wilson writes of Landor: “[U]nlike Hazlitt, who alienated friends at an alarming rate, the eccentrically irascible Landor was highly regarded.”

 

Landor visited Lamb for one hour. He was charmed by Lamb’s sister Mary and, Wilson writes, “pleased with Lamb’s conversation, though Charles, according to Robinson, was not ‘at his ease,’ and ‘nothing in the conversation [was] recollectable.’” Landor, surprisingly, felt otherwise, and wrote these lines:

 

“Once, and once only, have I seen thy face,

Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue

Run o’r my breast, yet never has been left

Impression on it stronger or more sweet.

Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years,

What wisdom in thy levity, what truth

In every utterance of that purest soul!

Few are the spirits of the glorified

I’d spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven.”

 

In an 1834 letter to Lady Blessington, Landor wrote that Lamb “met me as if I had been a friend of twenty years’ standing; indeed he told me I had been so, and showed me some things I had written much longer ago and had utterly forgotten.” John Foster in his 1869 biography of Landor writes: “The hour he passed with Lamb was one of unalloyed enjoyment.”

 

Lamb would die two years later. Landor lived until 1864.