Because the poet worked for the architectural qualities of poetry, the "Hellenics" are not easily quotable. Landor's unit is not the line, not the passage, but the poem. To quote fragments of the "Hellenics is to show a limb or a torso instead of the whole statue. And even so it is not hard to discover lovely things in the "Hellenics." Here is a well-known stanza in Landor's rarer lyric strain

Tanagra! think not I forget

Thy beautifully-storied streets;
Be sure my memory bathes yet

In clear Thermodon, and yet greets
The blithe and liberal shepherd-boy,
Whose sunny bosom swells with joy,
When we accept his matted rushes

Upheaved with sylvan fruit; away he bounds and blushes.

The last line is not quite so felicitous as one would wish, and appears as if it had troubled the poet throughout, yet felicity is never lacking in the epigrams, so we must conclude the disappointing movement is deliberate. Landor's poetic genius was not lyric; it lay rather in dialogue and narrative. English taste insists that all poetry shall sing; without reflecting that nobody would sing a narrative. But because Landor did not sacrifice everything to sound and "prismatic" conceits it does not follow that he is lacking in richness. When

for a while he relaxes from his Attic severity into a more Sicilian mood, few poets are capable of such richness

In spring we garland him with pointed flowers,
Anemone and crocus and jonquil,

And tender hyacinth in clustering curls;
Then with sweet-breathing mountain strawberry ;
Then pear and apple blossom, promising
(If he is good) to bring the fruit full-ripe,
Hanging it round about his brow, his nose,
Down even to his lips. When autumn comes,
His russet vine-wreath crackles under grapes:
Some trim his neck with barley, wheat, and oat ;
Some twine his naked waist with them; and last
His reverend head is seen and worshipped through
Stiff narrow olive-leaves, that last till spring.

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"Pointed flowers," sweet-breathing mountain strawberry," "stiff narrow olive-leaves "-are not such phrases the very marrow of Theocritus? Is it only a romantic fancy which makes one feel that no poets were ever so sensitive to the crisp outlines and clear tints of flowers and fruits as the Greeks ? Landor shared that exquisite plastic feeling. Only a poet who is so gifted with the love and understanding of their beauty can so evoke their essential form and colour and scent. The demi-gods whom the Greek poets invented as the spirits of flowers and trees and windy rocks were a projection of this sensitiveness. And Landor, the tender old Englishman, understood SO well that delicate

respect for beauty. Rhaicos

His Hamadryad says

And wouldst thou too shed the most innocent
Of blood? no vow demands it; no God wills
The oak to bleed.

And again

to

I have no flock: I kill

Nothing that breathes, that stirs, that feels the air,

The sun, the dew. Why should the beautiful
(And thou art beautiful) disturb the source

Whence springs all beauty? Hast thou never heard
Of Hamadryads?

There is nothing mawkish in this sentiment. The idylls which compose the "Hellenics" are chiefly heroic. Landor can express the finest emotions of the lover of beauty and understand wild flowers like a sensitive woman; but he can also express fortitude with vehement eloquence. There is no weak pathos in his dying Achilles

Not that Larissa in a quiet tomb

Holds my brave ancestors grieve I, O Death,
Not that my mother will lament my loss,
Lone in the bower of Tethys, for a while;
I grieve that Troy should ever thus exult
Without more slaughter of the faithless race.
Open the turf, removed the blackened boughs,
And let the urn of Menætiades

Take my bones too.

Landor's dramatic conceptions, sometimes a little strained, are nearly always heroic and dignified.

He has imagined a great emotional situation in the meeting of the shades of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia, when she-not knowing he has been murdered by her mother-exclaims at his turning back his head in shame

Beloved father! is the blade

Again to pierce my bosom? 'tis unfit
For sacrifice; no blood is in its veins ;
No God requires it here; here are no wrongs
To vindicate, no realms to overthrow.
You are standing as at Aulis in the fane,
With face averted, holding (as before)

My hand; but yours burns not, as then it burn'd ;
This alone shows that we are with the Blest,

Nor subject to the sufferings we have borne.
I will win back past kindness.

Tell me then,

Tell how my mother fares who loved me so,
And griev'd as 'twere for you, to see me part.
Frown not, but pardon me for tarrying

Amid too idle words, now asking how

She prais'd us both (which most ?) for what we did.

It is hardly possible that the "Hellenics" could become popular. Many, whose taste is formed on less august models, will never feel the pure heroic beauty of the "Hellenics." Yet Landor will always find some enthusiasts to prefer the "diaphanous beauties of the "Hellenics" to the more dazzling but less satisfying attractions of "prismatic poetry.

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XIV

VICTOR HUGO AND "LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES"

A LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES" was designed

"LA by its author as an Epic of Progress. It was

published in 1859, so that only sixty years elapsed between its first appearance and its inclusion in the series of "Grands Écrivains de la France," which is a kind of final homage to the illustrious. Yet, if one may judge from the date at the end of M. Paul Berret's excellent introduction, this edition would have appeared in 1914 had the publication not been delayed by a grand expression of Progress. A curious coincidence that this magniloquent praise of Progress should have been delayed six years by a European war; that this homage should be paid it at the very moment when its main idea is heavily discredited.

Hugo's faith in mechanically propelled vehicles as an evidence of Progress (the capital "P" seems as appropriate as in the allied Podsnappery), as a proof of civilization, even as being civilization itself, is