4576. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 140–142.
[Florence]
[Postmark: 16 January 1860]
My dear kind Browning—Here are a few remarks which I scribbled as I went on with Schlegel. I have gone no farther in his book. [1] What I am now sending to you is worthless, but I know you are expecting a few lines from me. Miss Blagden told me yesterday that Robert had been thrown from his poney—happily unhurt. I suspect he did not mind my advice to turn his knees more inward than outward– I wish I were at Rome to break the refractory little charger. He might do his worst with me—he could not throw me, weak as I am grown. I begin to have better hopes in politics—but I forbear to say who or what coronat opus.– [2] No books are come from England or Fiesole.
Ever yours, WSL
Schlegel in his 15 Lecture, well remarks that [“]the Roman patricians, originally a sacerdotal school became mere secular statesmen, and regarded their hereditary priesthood in no other light than that of a political form.” [3] Is not this equally true of the present regimen at Rome? The Popes may go higher up than to St Peter, and only stop at Romulus, if even there, for the older Etruscans left them the patrimony which the[y] claim only from the fisherman; no small one for a netful of roach and gudgeons.
Schlegel is unjust to Ovid, the most imaginative of ancient poets[.] He is not discursive and vague. The praise of Quintilian, who knew nothing of poetry as he proved in his low estimate of Lucretius, [4] is worth nothing; but certainly Ovid’s Medea was unlikely to be a “caricature of Euripides.” [5] He had infinitely more power and invention. I doubt not that some verses in the Medea attributed to Seneca are Ovid’s. Nothing in Euripides is comparable in passion and energy, and terseness to those beginning Quid tamen Iason potuit? [6]
When an enthusiastic critic says [“]O Menander and life, which of you copied the other” [7] we may be sure that Menander [8] excelled in truth of character as Aristophanes in ridicule and exaggeration.
I was not afraid of encountering Orestes, after Euripides and Sophocles and the grander Æschylus. [9] It is near seventy years since I read the tragedy of the two former, and sixty since that of Æschylus. I was glad to have forgotten how either of them treated the subject, for it has always been my practise to remove what has been written by others on the same ground I was taking. [10] But it was impossible to forget Popes Heloise to Abelard. [11] Reading their letters, I thought it would be interesting to imagine the beginning of their passion, and consequently I wrote two Imaginary Conversations, in which the Canon Fulbert is introduced. [12]
Every human Being is a critic of some thing or other: even of poetry there have been many; but I can bring to my recollection two only, (Southey and Schlegel) worth rubbing the ear and touching the brow for.
Address: Robert Browning Esq / 28 Via del Tritone / 2no Piano / Roma.
Publication: BBIS-5, 24–25 (as 19 January 1860).
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
2. “Crowns the work.”
3. Cf. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 1861, Lecture XV, p. 208: “The Patricians, originally an Etruscan sacerdotal school, had become mere secular statesmen and warriors, who regarded their hereditary priesthood in no other light than that of a political form.”
4. In discussing Roman poets, Quintilian (ca. 35–100 A.D.) writes that after Vergil, “All the rest trail far behind. Macer and Lucretius are certainly worth reading, but not to form style ... Each is elegant on his own subject, but the former is prosaic and the latter difficult” (The Orator’s Education—Institutio oratoria, 10, 1, 87, trans. Donald Russell).
5. In Lecture XV, Schlegel writes: “Ovid, who tried so many departments of poetry, also attempted Tragedy, and was the author of a Medea. To judge from the wordy and commonplace displays of passion in his Heroides, we might expect from him, in Tragedy, at most, a caricature of Euripides. Quinctilian [sic], however, asserts that he proved here, for once, what he might have done, had he chosen to restrain himself instead of yielding to his natural propensity to diffuseness” (pp. 207–208).
6. “Yet what could Jason do?” (Seneca, Medea, 1, 137, trans. John G. Fitch).
7. The critic was Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 257–180 B.C.), head of the library at Alexandria, who ranked Menander “second to Homer himself, and praised his realism with these famous lines: ‘O Menander and Life! / Which of you is imitating which?’” (Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy, Cambridge, Mass., 2001, p. 153).
8. Menander (342–291 B.C.), Athenian dramatist of more than 100 comedies, of which only a few fragments have survived.
9. The character of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, figures prominently in Æschylus’ Choëphoræ and Eumenides, in Sophocles’ Electra; and in Euripides’ Orestes, Electra, and Iphigenia among the Taurians.
10. Presumably, Landor refers to “Orestes and Electra,” which first appeared in Pericles and Aspasis (1836), and which he reprinted in The Hellenics (1859).
11. “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717).
12. See letters 4557 and 4565.
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