Count Julian Part 1

Count Julian.

by Walter Savage Landor.

INTRODUCTION.

Walter Savage Landor was born on the 30th of January, 1775, and died at the age of eighty-nine in September, 1864. He was the eldest son of a physician at Warwick, and his second name, Savage, was the family name of his mother, who owned two estates in Warwicks.h.i.+re-- Ipsley Court and Tachbrook--and had a reversionary interest in Hughenden Manor, Buckinghams.h.i.+re. To this property, worth 80,000 pounds, her eldest son was heir. That eldest son was born a poet, had a generous nature, and an ardent impetuous temper. The temper, with its obstinate claim of independence, was too much for the head master of Rugby, who found in Landor the best writer of Latin verse among his boys, but one ready to fight him over difference of opinion about a Latin quant.i.ty. In 1793 Landor went to Trinity College, Oxford. He had been got rid of at Rugby as unmanageable.

After two years at Oxford, he was rusticated; thereupon he gave up his chambers, and refused to return. Landor's father, who had been much tried by his unmanageable temper, then allowed him 150 pounds a year to live with as he pleased, away from home. He lived in South Wales--at Swansea, Tenby, or elsewhere--and he sometimes went home to Warwick for short visits. In South Wales he gave himself to full communion with the poets and with Nature, and he fastened with particular enthusiasm upon Milton. Lord Aylmer, who lived near Tenby, was among his friends. Rose Aylmer, whose name he has made through death imperishable, by linking it with a few lines of perfect music, {1} lent Landor "The Progress of Romance," a book published in 1785, by Clara Reeve, in which he found the description of an Arabian tale that suggested to him his poem of "Gebir."

Landor began "Gebir" in Latin, then turned it into English, and then vigorously condensed what he had written. The poem was first published at Warwick as a sixpenny pamphlet in the year 1798, when Landor's age was twenty-three. Robert Southey was among the few who bought it, and he first made known its power. In the best sense of the phrase, "Gebir" was written in cla.s.sical English, not with a search for pompous words of cla.s.sical origin to give false dignity to style, but with strict endeavour to form terse English lines of apt words well compacted. Many pa.s.sages appear to have been half thought out in Greek or Latin, some, as that on the sea-sh.e.l.l (on page 19), were first written in Latin, and Landor re-issued "Gebir"

with a translation into Latin three or four years after its first appearance.

"Gebir" was written nine years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, and at a time when the victories of Napoleon were in many minds a.s.sociated with the hopes of man. In the first edition of the poem there were, in the nuptial voyage of Tamar, prophetic visions of the triumph of his race, in march of the French Republic from the Garonne to the Rhine -

"How grand a prospect opens! Alps o'er Alps Tower, to survey the triumphs that proceed.

Here, while Garumna dances in the gloom Of larches, mid her naiads, or reclined Leans on a broom-clad bank to watch the sports Of some far-distant chamois silken haired, The chaste Pyrene, drying up her tears, Finds, with your children, refuge: yonder, Rhine Lays his imperial sceptre at your feet."

The hope of the purer spirits in the years of revolution, expressed by Wordsworth's

"War shall cease, Did ye not hear, that conquest is abjured?"

was in the first design of "Gebir," and in those early years of hope Landor joined to the vision of the future for the sons of Tamar that,

"Captivity led captive, war o'erthrown, They shall o'er Europe, shall o'er earth extend Empire that seas alone and skies confine, And glory that shall strike the crystal stars."

Landor was led by the failure of immediate expectation to revise his poem and omit from the third and the sixth books about one hundred and fifty lines, while adding fifty to heal over the wounds made by excision. As the poem stands, it is a rebuke of tyrannous ambition in the tale of Gebir, prince of Boetic Spain, from whom Gibraltar took its name. Gebir, bound by a vow to his dying father in the name of ancestral feud to invade Egypt, prepares invasion, but yields in Egypt to the touch of love, seeks to rebuild the ruins of the past, and learns what are the fruits of ambition. This he learns in the purgatory of conquerors, where he sees the figures of the Stuarts, of William the Deliverer, and of George the Third, "with eyebrows white and slanting brow," intentionally confused with Louis XVI. to avoid a charge of treason. But the strength of Landor's sympathy with the French Revolution and of his contempt for George III. was more evident in the first form of the poem.

Parallel with the quenching in Gebir of the conqueror's ambition, and with the ruin of his life and its new hope by the destroying powers that our misunderstandings of the better life bring into play, runs that part of the poem which shows Tamar, his brother, preparing to dwell with the sea nymph, the ideal, far away from all the struggle of mankind.

Recognition of the great beauty of Lander's "Gebir" came first from Southey in "The Critical Review." Southey found that the poem grew upon him, and became afterwards Landor's lifelong friend. When Sh.e.l.ley was at Oxford in 1811, there were times when he would read nothing but "Gebir." His friend Hogg says that when he went to Sh.e.l.ley's rooms one morning to tell him something of importance, he could not draw his attention away from "Gebir." Hogg impatiently threw the book out of window. It was brought back by a servant, and Sh.e.l.ley immediately fastened upon it again.

At the close of 1805 Landor's father died, and the young poet became a man of property. In 1808 Southey and Landor first met. Their friends.h.i.+p remained unbroken. When Spain rose to throw off the yoke of Napoleon, Landor's enthusiasm carried him to Corunna, where he paid for the equipment of a thousand volunteers, and joined the Spanish army of the North. After the Convention of Cintra he returned to England. Then he bought a large Welsh estate--Llanthony Priory--paid for it by selling other property, and began costly improvements. But he lived chiefly at Bath, where he married, in 1811, when his age was thirty-six, a girl of twenty. It was then that he began his tragedy of "Count Julian." The patriotic struggle in Spain commended at the same time to Scott, Southey, and Landor the story of Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings, against whom, to avenge wrong done to his daughter, Count Julian called the Moors in to invade his country. In 1810 Southey was working at his poem of "Roderick the Last of the Goths," in fellows.h.i.+p with his friend Landor, who was treating the same subject in his play. Scott's "Roderick" was being printed so nearly at the same time with Landor's play, that Landor wrote to Southey early in 1812 while the proof-sheets were coming to him: "I am surprised that Upham has not sent me Mr. Scott's poem yet. However, I am not sorry. I feel a sort of satisfaction that mine is going to the press first, though there is little danger that we should think on any subject alike, or stumble on any one character in the same track." De Quincey spoke of the hidden torture shown in Landor's play to be ever present in the mind of Count Julian, the betrayer of his country, as greater than the tortures inflicted in old Rome on generals who had committed treason. De Quincey's admiration of this play was more than once expressed. "Mr. Landor," he said, "who always rises with his subject, and dilates like Satan into Teneriffe or Atlas when he sees before him an antagonist worthy of his powers, is probably the one man in Europe that has adequately conceived the situation, the stern self-dependency, and the monumental misery of Count Julian.

That sublimity of penitential grief, which cannot accept consolation from man, cannot bear external reproach, cannot condescend to notice insult, cannot so much as SEE the curiosity of bystanders; that awful carelessness of all but the troubled deeps within his own heart, and of G.o.d's spirit brooding upon their surface and searching their abysses; never was so majestically described."

H. M.

CHARACTERS.

COUNT JULIAN.

RODERIGO, King of Spain.

OPAS, Metropolitan of Seville.

SISABERT, betrothed to Covilla.

MUZA, Prince of Mauritania.

ABDALAZIS, Son of Muza.

TARIK, Moorish Chieftain.

COVILLA, Daughter of Julian.

EGILONA, Wife of Roderigo.

HERNANDO, } OSMA, } Officers.

RAMIRO, &c. }

FIRST ACT: FIRST SCENE.

Camp of JULIAN.

OPAS. JULIAN.

OPAS. See her, Count Julian: if thou lovest G.o.d, See thy lost child.

JUL. I have avenged me, Opas, More than enough: I only sought to hurl The brands of war on one detested head, And die upon his ruin. O my country!

O lost to honour, to thyself, to me, Why on barbarian hands devolves thy cause, Spoilers, blasphemers!

OPAS. Is it thus, Don Julian, When thy own offspring, that beloved child, For whom alone these very acts were done By them and thee, when thy Covilla stands An outcast and a suppliant at thy gate, Why that still stubborn agony of soul, Those struggles with the bars thyself imposed?

Is she not thine? not dear to thee as ever?

JUL. Father of mercies! shew me none, whene'er The wrongs she suffers cease to wring my heart, Or I seek solace ever, but in death.

OPAS. What wilt thou do then, too unhappy man?

JUL. What have I done already? All my peace Has vanished; my fair fame in after-times Will wear an alien and uncomely form, Seen o'er the cities I have laid in dust, Countrymen slaughtered, friends abjured!

OPAS. And faith?

JUL. Alone now left me, filling up in part The narrow and waste intervals of grief: It promises that I shall see again My own lost child.

OPAS. Yes, at this very hour.

JUL. Till I have met the tyrant face to face, And gained a conquest greater than the last; Till he no longer rules one rood of Spain, And not one Spaniard, not one enemy, The least relenting, flags upon his flight; Till we are equal in the eyes of men, The humblest and most wretched of our kind, No peace for me, no comfort, no--no child!

OPAS. No pity for the thousands fatherless, The thousands childless like thyself, nay more, The thousands friendless, helpless, comfortless - Such thou wilt make them, little thinking so, Who now perhaps, round their first winter fire, Banish, to talk of thee, the tales of old, Shedding true honest tears for thee unknown: Precious be these, and sacred in thy sight, Mingle them not with blood from hearts thus kind.

If only warlike spirits were evoked By the war-demon, I would not complain, Or dissolute and discontented men; But wherefore hurry down into the square The neighbourly, saluting, warm-clad race, Who would not injure us, and cannot serve; Who, from their short and measured slumber risen, In the faint suns.h.i.+ne of their balconies, With a half-legend of a martyrdom And some weak wine and withered graces before them, Note by their foot the wheel of melody That catches and rolls on the sabbath dance.

To drag the steady prop from failing age, Break the young stem that fondness twines around, Widen the solitude of lonely sighs, And scatter to the broad bleak wastes of day The ruins and the phantoms that replied, Ne'er be it thine.

JUL. Arise, and save me, Spain!

FIRST ACT: SECOND SCENE.