Count Julian
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Walter Savage Landor >> Count Julian
COUNT JULIAN
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 Warwickshire--
Ipsley Court and Tachbrook--and had a reversionary interest in
Hughenden Manor, Buckinghamshire. 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 quantity. 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 classical English, not with a
search for pompous words of classical origin to give false dignity
to style, but with strict endeavour to form terse English lines of
apt words well compacted. Many passages appear to have been half
thought out in Greek or Latin, some, as that on the sea-shell (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 associated 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
Shelley was at Oxford in 1811, there were times when he would read
nothing but "Gebir." His friend Hogg says that when he went to
Shelley'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
Shelley 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
friendship 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 fellowship 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 God'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 God,
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 sunshine 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.
MUZA enters.
MUZA. Infidel chief, thou tarriest here too long,
And art perhaps repining at the days
Of nine continued victories, o'er men
Dear to thy soul, tho' reprobate and base.
Away! [He retires.
JUL. I follow. Could my bitterest foes
Hear this! ye Spaniards, this! which I foreknew
And yet encountered; could they see your Julian
Receiving orders from and answering
These desperate and heaven-abandoned slaves,
They might perceive some few external pangs,
Some glimpses of the hell wherein I move,
Who never have been fathers.
OPAS. These are they
To whom brave Spaniards must refer their wrongs!
JUL. Muza, that cruel and suspicious chief,
Distrusts his friends more than his enemies,
Me more than either; fraud he loves and fears,
And watches her still footfall day and night.
OPAS. O Julian! such a refuge! such a race!
JUL. Calamities like mine alone implore.
No virtues have redeemed them from their bonds;
Wily ferocity, keen idleness,
And the close cringes of ill-whispering want,
Educate them to plunder and obey;
Active to serve him best whom most they fear,
They show no mercy to the merciful,
And racks alone remind them of the name.
OPAS. O everlasting curse for Spain and thee!
JUL. Spain should have vindicated then her wrongs
In mine, a Spaniard's and a soldier's wrongs.
OPAS. Julian, are thine the only wrongs on earth?
And shall each Spaniard rather vindicate
Thine than his own? is there no Judge of all?
Shall mortal hand seize with impunity
The sword of vengeance, from the armoury
Of the Most High? easy to wield, and starred
With glory it appears: but all the host
Of the archangels, should they strive at once,
Would never close again its widening blade.
JUL. He who provokes it hath so much to rue.
Where'er he turn, whether to earth or heaven,
He finds an enemy, or raises one.
OPAS. I never yet have seen where long success
Hath followed him who warred upon his king.
JUL. Because the virtue that inflicts the stroke
Dies with him, and the rank ignoble heads
Of plundering faction soon unite again,
And prince-protected share the spoil at rest.
FIRST ACT: THIRD SCENE.
Guard announces a herald. OPAS departs.
GUARD. A messenger of peace is at the gate,
My lord, safe access, private audience,
And free return, he claims.
JUL. Conduct him in.
RODERIGO enters as a herald.
A messenger of peace! audacious man!
In what attire appearest thou? a herald's?
Under no garb can such a wretch be safe.
ROD. Thy violence and fancied wrongs I know,
And what thy sacrilegious hands would do,
O traitor and apostate!
JUL. What they would
They cannot: thee of kingdom and of life
'Tis easy to despoil, thyself the traitor,
Thyself the violator of allegiance.
Oh would all-righteous Heaven they could restore
The joy of innocence, the calm of age,
The probity of manhood, pride of arms,
And confidence of honour! the august
And holy laws trampled beneath thy feet.
And Spain! O parent, I have lost thee too!
Yes, thou wilt curse me in thy latter days,
Me, thine avenger. I have fought her foe,
Roderigo, I have gloried in her sons,
Sublime in hardihood and piety:
Her strength was mine: I, sailing by her cliffs,
By promontory after promontory,
Opening like flags along some castle-towers,
Have sworn before the cross upon our mast
Ne'er shall invader wave his standard there.
ROD. Yet there thou plantest it, false man, thyself.
JUL. Accursed he who makes me this reproach,
And made it just! Had I been happy still,
I had been blameless: I had died with glory
Upon the walls of Ceuta.
ROD. Which thy treason
Surrendered to the Infidel.
JUL. 'Tis hard
And base to live beneath a conqueror:
Yet, amid all this grief and infamy,
'Twere something to have rushed upon the ranks
In their advance; 'twere something to have stood
Defeat, discomfiture; and, when around
No beacon blazes, no far axle groans
Through the wide plain, no sound of sustenance
Or succour soothes the still-believing ear,
To fight upon the last dismantled tower,
And yield to valour, if we yield at all.
But rather should my neck lie trampled down
By every Saracen and Moor on earth,
Than my own country see her laws o'erturned
By those who should protect them: Sir, no prince
Shall ruin Spain; and, least of all, her own.
Is any just or glorious act in view,
Your oaths forbid it: is your avarice,
Or, if there be such, any viler passion,
To have its giddy range, and to be gorged,
It rises over all your sacraments,
A hooded mystery, holier than they all.
ROD. Hear me, Don Julian; I have heard thy wrath
Who am thy king, nor heard man's wrath before.
JUL. Thou shalt hear mine, for thou art not my king.
ROD. Knowest thou not the altered face of war?
Xeres is ours; from every region round
True loyal Spaniards throng into our camp:
Nay, thy own friends and thy own family,
From the remotest provinces, advance
To crush rebellion: Sisabert is come,
Disclaiming thee and thine; the Asturian hills
Opposed to him their icy chains in vain:
But never wilt thou see him, never more,
Unless in adverse war, and deadly hate.
JUL. So lost to me! So generous, so deceived!
I grieve to hear it.
ROD. Come, I offer grace,
Honour, dominion: send away these slaves,
Or leave them to our sword, and all beyond
The distant Ebro to the towns of France
Shall bless thy name, and bend before thy throne.
I will myself accompany thee, I,
The king, will hail thee brother.
JUL. Ne'er shalt thou
Henceforth be king: the nation in thy name
May issue edicts, champions may command
The vassal multitudes of marshalled war,
And the fierce charger shrink before the shouts,
Lowered as if earth had opened at his feet,
While thy mailed semblance rises toward the ranks,
But God alone sees thee.
ROD. What hopest thou?
To conquer Spain, and rule a ravaged land?
To compass me around, to murder me?
JUL. No, Don Roderigo: swear thou, in the fight
That thou wilt meet me, hand to hand, alone,
That, if I ever save thee from a foe -
ROD. I swear what honour asks--first, to Covilla
Do thou present my crown and dignity.
JUL. Darest thou offer any price for shame?
ROD. Love and repentance.
JUL. Egilona lives:
And were she buried with her ancestors,
Covilla should not be the gaze of men,
Should not, despoiled of honour, rule the free.
ROD. Stern man! her virtues well deserve the throne.
JUL. And Egilona--what hath she deserved,
The good, the lovely?
ROD. But the realm in vain
Hoped a succession.
JUL. Thou hast torn away
The roots of royalty.
ROD. For her, for thee.
JUL. Blind insolence! base insincerity!
Power and renown no mortal ever shared,
Who could retain or grasp them to himself:
And, for Covilla? patience! peace! for her?
She call upon her God, and outrage Him
At His own altar! she repeat the vows
She violates in repeating! who abhors
Thee and thy crimes, and wants no crown of thine.
Force may compel the abhorrent soul, or want
Lash and pursue it to the public ways;
Virtue looks back and weeps, and may return
To these, but never near the abandoned one
Who drags religion to adultery's feet,
And rears the altar higher for her sake.
ROD. Have then the Saracens possessed thee quite,
And wilt thou never yield me thy consent?
JUL. Never.
ROD. So deep in guilt, in treachery!
Forced to acknowledge it! forced to avow
The traitor!
JUL. Not to thee, who reignest not,
But to a country ever dear to me,
And dearer now than ever: what we love
Is loveliest in departure! One I thought,
As every father thinks, the best of all,
Graceful, and mild, and sensible, and chaste:
Now all these qualities of form and soul
Fade from before me, nor on anyone
Can I repose, or be consoled by any.
And yet in this torn heart I love her more
Than I could love her when I dwelt on each,
Or clasped them all united, and thanked God,
Without a wish beyond.--Away, thou fiend!
O ignominy, last and worst of all!
I weep before thee--like a child--like mine -
And tell my woes, fount of them all, to thee!
FIRST ACT: FOURTH SCENE.
ABDALAZIS enters.
ABD. Julian, to thee, the terror of the faithless,
I bring my father's order, to prepare
For the bright day that crowns thy brave exploits:
Our enemy is at the very gate!
And art thou here, with women in thy train,
Crouching to gain admittance to their lord,
And mourning the unkindness of delay!
JUL. [much agitated, goes towards the door, and returns.]
I am prepared: Prince, judge not hastily.
ABD. Whether I should not promise all they ask,
I too could hesitate, though earlier taught
The duty to obey, and should rejoice
To shelter in the universal storm
A frame so delicate, so full of fears,
So little used to outrage and to arms,
As one of these; so humble, so uncheered
At the gay pomp that smoothes the track of war.
When she beheld me from afar dismount,
And heard my trumpet, she alone drew back,
And, as though doubtful of the help she seeks,
Shuddered to see the jewels on my brow,
And turned her eyes away, and wept aloud.
The other stood awhile, and then advanced:
I would have spoken, but she waved her hand
And said, "Proceed, protect us, and avenge,
And be thou worthier of the crown thou wearest."
Hopeful and happy is indeed our cause,
When the most timid of the lovely hail
Stranger and foe -
ROD. [unnoticed by ABDALAZIS.]
And shrink but to advance.
ABD. Thou tremblest? whence, O Julian! whence this change?
Thou lovest still thy country.
JUL. Abdalazis!
All men with human feelings love their country.
Not the highborn or wealthy man alone,
Who looks upon his children, each one led
By its gay handmaid, from the high alcove,
And hears them once a day: not only he
Who hath forgotten, when his guest inquires
The name of some far village all his own;
Whose rivers bound the province, and whose hills
Touch the last cloud upon the level sky:
No; better men still better love their country.
'Tis the old mansion of their earliest friends,
The chapel of their first and best devotions;
When violence or perfidy invades,
Or when unworthy lords hold wassail there,
And wiser heads are drooping round its moats,
At last they fix their steady and stiff eye
There, there alone--stand while the trumpet blows,
And view the hostile flames above its towers
Spire, with a bitter and severe delight.
ABD. [taking his hand.]
Thou feelest what thou speakest, and thy Spain
Will ne'er be sheltered from her fate by thee.
We, whom the prophet sends o'er many lands,
Love none above another; Heaven assigns
Their fields and harvests to our valiant swords,
And 'tis enough--we love while we enjoy.
Whence is the man in that fantastic guise?
Suppliant? or herald? he who stalks about,
And once was even seated while we spoke:
For never came he with us o'er the sea.
JUL. He comes as herald.
ROD. Thou shalt know full soon,
Insulting Moor.
ABD. He cannot bear the grief
His country suffers; I will pardon him.
He lost his courage first, and then his mind;
His courage rushes back, his mind still wanders.
The guest of heaven was piteous to these men,
And princes stoop to feed them in their courts.
FIRST ACT: FIFTH SCENE.
RODERIGO is going out when MUZA enters with EGILONA; RODERIGO starts
back.
MUZA [sternly to EGILONA.]
Enter, since 'tis the custom in this land.
EGI. [passing MUZA disdainfully, points to ABDALAZIS, and says to
JULIAN.]
Is this our future monarch, or art thou?
JUL. 'Tis Abdalazis, son of Muza, prince
Commanding Africa, from Abyla
To where Tunisian pilots bend the eye
O'er ruined temples in the glassy wave.
Till quiet times and ancient laws return,
He comes to govern here.
ROD. To-morrow's dawn
Proves that.
MUZA. What art thou?
ROD. [drawing his sword.] King.
ABD. Amazement!
MUZA. Treason!
EGI. O horror!
MUZA. Seize him.
EGI. Spare him! fly to me!
JUL. Urge me not to protect a guest, a herald -
The blasts of war roar over him unfelt.
EGI. Ah fly, unhappy!
ROD. Fly! no, Egilona -
Dost thou forgive me? dost thou love me? still?
EGI. I hate, abominate, abhor thee--go,
Or my own vengeance -
ROD. [taking JULIAN's hand, and inviting him to attack MUZA and
ABDALAZIS.]
Julian!
JUL. Hence, or die.
SECOND ACT: FIRST SCENE.
Camp of JULIAN.
JULIAN and COVILLA.
JUL. Obdurate! I am not as I appear.
Weep, my beloved child, Covilla, weep
Into my bosom; every drop be mine
Of this most bitter soul-empoisoning cup:
Into no other bosom than thy father's
Canst thou, or wouldst thou, pour it.
COV. Cease, my lord,
My father, angel of my youth, when all
Was innocence and peace.
JUL. Arise, my love,
Look up to heaven--where else are souls like thine!
Mingle in sweet communion with its children,
Trust in its providence, its retribution,
And I will cease to mourn; for, O my child,
These tears corrode, but thine assuage the heart.
COV. And never shall I see my mother too,
My own, my blessed mother!
JUL. Thou shalt see
Her and thy brothers.
COV. No! I cannot look
On them, I cannot meet their lovely eyes,
I cannot lift mine up from under theirs.
We all were children when they went away;
They now have fought hard battles, and are men,
And camps and kings they know, and woes and crimes.
Sir, will they never venture from the walls
Into the plain? Remember, they are young,
Hardy and emulous and hazardous;
And who is left to guard them in the town?
JUL. Peace is throughout the land: the various tribes
Of that vast region sink at once to rest,
Like one wide wood when every wind lies hushed.
COV. And war, in all its fury, roams o'er Spain.
JUL. Alas! and will for ages: crimes are loose
At which ensanguined War stands shuddering;
And calls for vengeance from the powers above,
Impatient of inflicting it himself.
Nature in these new horrors is aghast
At her own progeny, and knows them not.
I am the minister of wrath; the hands
That tremble at me, shall applaud me too,
And seal their condemnation.