Correspondence

4569.  Walter Savage Landor to RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 130–131.

[Florence]

[Postmark: 7 January 1860]

I am reading W. Schelegel’s [sic] Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. [1] I met him at Heideburgh [sic], [2] and gave him some offence. He was reviling Niebuhr, and askt Julius Hare [3] about him in these words “And this is the man you call a historian.” Hare, who had translated and praised him, said nothing—but I said [“]Perhaps Mr Schlegel who has found out that Shakespear is a poet may discover that Niebuhr is a historian”. Francis Hare, [4] not Julius, (here I try my third new pen)– [(]It wont do, I must attempt a fourth). Francis Hare told me a curious story about Schlegel’s two marriages, and his separation from each after a few month’s. He married the daughter of Paulus, with whom I converst daily at Heidelburg. [5] The poet Arndt [6] is living stil, at Bonn. I regret that I did not take to England from Spain, a few dozen volumes of Camoens. The portuguese is very like the spanish spoken by a negro. Lord Strangford has translated the best poems of that author, and very well. [7] I know not whether the Spanish and Portuguese poets have taken it into the[ir] heads to adopt the hexameter—surely it is more fitted to their languages than to the German and English, where it rumbles and breaks down at every rut. At Rugby we were learners of the alcaic meter by this stanza–

 

O bellicosos, Postume, Postume!

O bellicosos, Postume Postume!

O bellicosos! bellicosos!

Postume! Postume!

Bellicosos. [8]

If any young Englishman should be idle enough to try his hand at alcaics, I will give him a model on the other side of this paper.

 

O silly poets! Love is your hobbyhorse,

O silly poets! Love is your hobbyhorse,

O silly poets! Silly poets!

Love is your hobbyhorse, silly poets.

You will see how nearly an english meter comes to the last of these verses—just putting O before “silly[.]” It appears to me that the most harmonious of our stanzas is “Farewell, O native Spain, farewell for ever” [9] followed by one of a syllable less. It seems better adapted to elegiac, and all tender poetry, than any others, modern or ancient. Poor Lewis wrote two poems of exquisite beauty—this on Departure from Spain and Imogene, of which I remember every syllable after half a century. I hate Ghosts—but Alonzo the Brave fairly beats the Germans out of field, [10] with only Leonora by the side of him. [11]

Address: Robert Browning Esq / 28 Via del Tritone / 2ndo Piano / Roma.

Publication: BBIS-5, pp. 22–23 (as 4 January 1860).

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845), Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur: Vorlesungen (3 vols., Heidelberg, 1809–11).

2. Actually, Bonn, in the company of Hare and Thomas Worsley; see R.H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, New York, 1954, p. 233.

3. Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855), co-translator of B.G. Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte (2nd ed., fully revised, 1827–32): The History of Rome (3 vols., Cambridge and London, 1828–42).

4. Francis George Hare (1786–1842), Julius Hare’s elder brother.

5. On 30 August 1818, at Heidelberg, Schlegel married Marie Sophie Paulus (1791–1847), daughter of Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851), Protestant theologian. They remained together for only a few weeks. Schlegel's first marriage, 1 July 1796, to Caroline Dorothea Albertine Michaelis (1763–1809), ended in divorce.

6. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), German patriotic author, died at Bonn on 29 January.

7. Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens (1803), trans. Percy Clinton Sydney Smythe (1780–1855), 6th Viscount Strangford.

8. “O warlike, Postume, Postume! / O warlike, Postume, Postume! / O warlike, warlike! / Postume, Postume! / Warlike.”

9. The first line of “The Exile,” from chap. V in The Monk (1803) by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818).

10. “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine” from chap. IX in The Monk.

11. “Lenore” (1744), a ballad by Gottfried August Burger (1747–94), was much admired by Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, among others.

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