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TITLE: GEBIR
AUTHOR: WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
EBOOK: E02196 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

GEBIR

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.

FIRST BOOK.

I sing the fates of Gebir.  He had dwelt
Among those mountain-caverns which retain
His labours yet, vast halls and flowing wells,
Nor have forgotten their old master's name
Though severed from his people here, incensed
By meditating on primeval wrongs,
He blew his battle-horn, at which uprose
Whole nations; here, ten thousand of most might
He called aloud, and soon Charoba saw
His dark helm hover o'er the land of Nile,
   What should the virgin do? should royal knees
Bend suppliant, or defenceless hands engage
Men of gigantic force, gigantic arms?
For 'twas reported that nor sword sufficed,
Nor shield immense nor coat of massive mail,
But that upon their towering heads they bore
Each a huge stone, refulgent as the stars.
This told she Dalica, then cried aloud:
"If on your bosom laying down my head
I sobbed away the sorrows of a child,
If I have always, and Heaven knows I have,
Next to a mother's held a nurse's name,
Succour this one distress, recall those days,
Love me, though 'twere because you loved me then."
   But whether confident in magic rites
Or touched with sexual pride to stand implored,
Dalica smiled, then spake:  "Away those fears.
Though stronger than the strongest of his kind,
He falls--on me devolve that charge; he falls.
Rather than fly him, stoop thou to allure;
Nay, journey to his tents:  a city stood
Upon that coast, they say, by Sidad built,
Whose father Gad built Gadir; on this ground
Perhaps he sees an ample room for war.
Persuade him to restore the walls himself
In honour of his ancestors, persuade -
But wherefore this advice? young, unespoused,
Charoba want persuasions! and a queen!"
   "O Dalica!" the shuddering maid exclaimed,
"Could I encounter that fierce, frightful man?
Could I speak? no, nor sigh!"
      "And canst thou reign?"
Cried Dalica; "yield empire or comply."
Unfixed though seeming fixed, her eyes downcast,

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