STEVE JOBS AT HOME IN 1982 — "This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that's what I had." —Steve Jobs
ANNE TYLER — The author Anne Tyler at home in Baltimore, Maryland, 1985.
[from: http://ririanproject.com/2007/04/20/10-golden-lessons-from-steve-jobs/]
1. Steve Jobs said: "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."
Innovation has no limits. The only limit is your imagination. It's time for you to begin thinking out of the box. If you are involved in a growing industry, think of ways to become more efficient; more customer friendly; and easier to do business with. If you are involved in a shrinking industry – get out of it quick and change before you become obsolete; out of work; or out of business. And remember that procrastination is not an option here. Start innovating now!
2. Steve Jobs said: "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
There is no shortcut to excellence. You will have to make the commitment to make excellence your priority. Use your talents, abilities, and skills in the best way possible and get ahead of others by giving that little extra. Live by a higher standard and pay attention to the details that really do make the difference. Excellence is not difficult - simply decide right now to give it your best shot - and you will be amazed with what life gives you back.
3. Steve Jobs said: "The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."
I've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." Seek out an occupation that gives you a sense of meaning, direction and satisfaction in life. Having a sense of purpose and striving towards goals gives life meaning, direction and satisfaction. It not only contributes to health and longevity, but also makes you feel better in difficult times. Do you jump out of bed on Monday mornings and look forward to the work week? If the answer is 'no' keep looking, you'll know when you find it.
4. Steve Jobs said: "You know, we don't grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We use a mathematics that other people evolved… I mean, we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge."
Live in a way that is ethically responsible. Try to make a difference in this world and contribute to the higher good. You'll find it gives more meaning to your life and it's a great antidote to boredom. There is always so much to be done. And talk to others about what you are doing. Don't preach or be self-righteous, or fanatical about it, that just puts people off, but at the same time, don't be shy about setting an example, and use opportunities that arise to let others know what you are doing.
5. Steve Jobs said: "There's a phrase in Buddhism, 'Beginner's mind.' It's wonderful to have a beginner's mind."
It is the kind of mind that can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything. Beginner's mind is Zen practice in action. It is the mind that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgements and prejudices. Think of beginner's mind as the mind that faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and amazement.
6. Steve Jobs said: "We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
Reams of academic studies over the decades have amply confirmed television's pernicious mental and moral influences. And most TV watchers know that their habit is mind-numbing and wasteful, but still spend most of their time in front of that box. So turn your TV off and save some brain cells. But be cautious, you can turn your brain off by using a computer also. Try and have an intelligent conversation with someone who plays first person shooters for 8 hours a day. Or auto race games, or role-playing games.
7. Steve Jobs said: "I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It's very character-building."
Don't equate making mistakes with being a mistake. There is no such thing as a successful person who has not failed or made mistakes, there are successful people who made mistakes and changed their lives or performance in response to them, and so got it right the next time. They viewed mistakes as warnings rather than signs of hopeless inadequacy. Never making a mistake means never living life to the full.
8. Steve Jobs said: "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
Over the last decade, numerous books featuring lessons from historical figures have appeared on the shelves of bookstores around the world. And Socrates stands with Leonardo da Vinci, Nicholas Copernicus, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein as a beacon of inspiration for independent thinkers. But he came first. Cicero said of Socrates that, "He called philosophy down from the skies and into the lives of men." So use Socrates' principles in your life, your work, your learning, and your relationships. It's not about Socrates, it's really about you, and how you can bring more truth, beauty and goodness into your life everyday.
9. Steve Jobs said: "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?"
Did you know that you have big things to accomplish in life? And did you know that those big things are getting rather dusty while you pour yourself another cup of coffee, and decide to mull things over rather than do them? We were all born with a gift to give in life, one which informs all of our desires, interests, passions and curiosities. This gift is, in fact, our purpose. And you don't need permission to decide your own purpose. No boss, teacher, parent, priest or other authority can decide this for you. Just find that unique purpose.
10. Steve Jobs said: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Are you tired of living someone else's dream? No doubt, its your life and you have every right to spend it in your own individual way without any hurdles or barriers from others. Give yourself a chance to nurture your creative qualities in a fear-free and pressure-free climate. Live a life that YOU choose and be your own boss.
The following is an edited version of an article published in the Jan. 18 issue of New Scientist (vol. 177, issue 2378, page 40--reprinted with permission). The interview was conducted by Steve Nadis, a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. The original interview is available online.
When he was 12, Erik Demaine talked himself into Dalhousie University in his home town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, despite having no grades or academic record to speak of. Eight years and a Ph.D. later, he became MIT's youngest professor in the fall of 2001. He specializes in computational origami--the geometry of paper folding.
Q. You left school at the age of seven and spent the next five years on the road with your father. Why?
A. Mainly because it seemed like a fun thing to do. My dad, Martin, was a craftsman, which made it easy for him to travel and sell his stuff at craft fairs throughout the U.S. It was a very free-form existence. Our movements weren't guided by anything more specific than "that seems like an interesting place to go."
Q. What happened to your formal education during those years of wandering?
A. My dad taught me from home-school manuals we got from an agency. When I was nine, it became more efficient for me to teach myself from the same materials. That approach worked well for everything but spelling, which is hard to test yourself on. But we figured out a system for that, too.
Q. Were you ever curious about what went on inside the classroom?
A. I checked out normal schools from time to time to make sure I wasn't missing anything. My longest stint was a month in a Miami school because I was intrigued by a cute girl. But I left once I realised she had no interest in me. The main thing I learned was how much time is wasted in school. When you take away lunch, recess and other breaks, the nine-to-three day reduces to about one hour of real instruction. Home schooling is much more efficient.
Q. When did you become interested in mathematics?
A. It started from playing video games when I was quite young. I asked my dad how people wrote those games, and he said you first have to learn how to write a computer program. He got hold of some books on programming so he could teach me, and soon I was reading the books on my own. After a year or so of that, he said, "If you want to be good at computers, you have to be good at mathematics." So I said, "OK, let's learn some mathematics." I started with a high school algebra text, and things took off from there.
Q. Do you feel any sort of age gap at MIT, being far younger than both your faculty colleagues and many of your students?
A. That's becoming less of an issue now that I can go to bars legally, but age has never really been important in my life. Some people who accomplished a lot when they were young have stressed their age as a way of making their achievements stand out even more. I try to downplay the age thing because eventually everyone gets older.
Q. What's your father up to these days?
A. He's a visiting scientist at MIT with an office in this lab. When MIT offered me a position, they offered him a position too, which was great. Sometimes we work together; other times we work separately. He has tried to keep up in mathematics, learning this stuff as I've been learning it, but as I've got deeper into the field our roles have changed somewhat.
Q. What was your first real accomplishment in mathematics?
A. Six years ago, when I began my Ph.D. work in computational geometry at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, my dad remembered "the paper cut problem" from an article written in the 1960s on paper folding and mathematics. The idea is to take a piece of paper, fold it any way and as many times as you want, and then make one straight cut and see what shapes you get. The question is, are all shapes possible? I worked on this problem for two years at Dalhousie with my dad and adviser Anna Lubiw. After experimenting for a while, we realised you could make all kinds of shapes, such as butterflies, swans, hearts or stars.
Q. What are you doing when you're not working on folding problems?
A. I have a separate project that involves a new approach to organizing data. My hope is to make web searches quicker and more efficient. Last week, a mathematician from Spain visited me and we looked at the classic problem in facility location: where, for instance, would you site 100 fast-food outlets to make them closest to the most people? I also work in combinatorial game theory, studying the complexity of computer games such as Tetris, which in fact is what got me into mathematics in the first place. My goal is to keep moving into new areas of mathematics and not be confined to a single branch.
Q. Does it seem weird to you to have a tenured job and so much stability in your life, given your nomadic past?
A. I guess I'm getting used to it. Stability seems like a good thing to me, and I can't see any downside. If you don't want it, you can always throw it away.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on February 26, 2003.
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.Walter Savage Landor (January 30, 1775 – September 17, 1864) was an English writer and poet, eldest son of Walter Landor and his wife Elizabeth Savage.
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Walter Savage Landor was born in Warwick, England, the eldest son of Walter Landor, a physician, and his wife, Elizabeth Savage. His mother owned a considerable amount of property, to which her eldest son was heir.
He was sent to Rugby School, but was removed at the headmaster's request and studied privately with Mr. Langley, vicar of Ashbourne. In 1793 he entered Trinity College, Oxford. He adopted republican principles and in 1794 fired a gun at the windows of a Tory for whom he had an aversion. He was rusticated for a year, and, although the authorities were willing to condone the offence, he refused to return. The affair led to a quarrel with his father in which Landor expressed his intention of leaving home for ever. He was, however, reconciled with his family through the efforts of his friend Dorothea Lyttelton. He entered no profession, but his father allowed him £150 a year, and he was free to live at home or not, as he pleased.
Landor settled in South Wales, returning home to Warwick for short visits. It was here that he became friendly with the family of Lord Aylmer, including his daughter, Rose, who Landor later immortalized in the poem, "Rose Aylmer". It was she who lent him the book in which he found a description of an Arabian Tale that inspired his poem, Gebir.
In 1793 appeared in a small volume, divided into three books, The Poems of Walter Savage Landor, and, in pamphlet form of nineteen pages, an anonymous Moral Epistle, respectfully dedicated to Earl Stanhope. No poet at the age of twenty ever had more vigour of style and fluency of verse; nor perhaps has any ever shown such masterly command of epigram and satire, made vivid and vital by the purest enthusiasm and most generous indignation.
Three years later appeared the first edition of the first great work which was to inscribe his name for ever among the great names in English poetry, Gebir.
The second edition of Gebir appeared in 1803, with a text corrected of grave errors and improved by magnificent additions. About the same time the whole poem was also published in a Latin form, which for might and melody of line, for power and perfection of language, must always dispute the palm of precedence with the English version. His father's death in 1802 put him in possession of an independent fortune. Landor settled in Bath. Here in 1808 he met Southey, and the mutual appreciation of the two poets led to a warm friendship.
In 1808, under an impulse not less heroic than that which was afterwards to lead Byron to a glorious death in redemption of Greece and his own good fame, Landor, then aged thirty-three, left England for Spain as a volunteer to serve in the national army against Napoleon at the head of a regiment raised and supported at his sole expense. After some three months campaigning came the affair of Cintra and its disasters; his troop, in the words of his biographer, dispersed or melted away, and he came back to England in as great a hurry as he had left it, but bringing with him the honorable recollection of a brave design unselfishly attempted.
The campaign also furnished the material in his memory for the sublimest poem published in our language, between the last masterpiece of Milton and the first masterpiece of Shelley, one equally worthy to stand unchallenged beside either for poetic perfection as well as moral majesty, the lofty tragedy of Count Julian, which appeared in 1812, without the name of its author. No comparable work is to be found in English poetry between the date of Samson Agoniites and the date of Prometheus Unbound; and with both these great works it has some points of greatness in common. The superhuman isolation of agony and endurance which encircles and exalts the hero is in each case expressed with equally appropriate magnificence of effect. The style of Count Julian, if somewhat deficient in dramatic ease and the fluency of natural dialogue, has such might and purity and majesty of speech as elsewhere we find only in Milton so long and so steadily sustained.
In May 1811 Landor had suddenly married Miss Julia Thuillier, with whose looks he had fallen in love at first sight in a ball-room at Bath; and in June they settled for a while at Llanthony Abbey in Monmouthshire, whence he was worried in three years time by the combined vexation of neighbors and tenants, lawyers and lords-lieutenant; not before much toil and money had been nobly wasted on attempts to improve the sterility of the land, to relieve the wretchedness and raise the condition of tIe peasantry. He left England for France at first, but after a brief residence at Tours took up his abode for three years at Como; and three more wandering years he passed, says his biographer, between Pisa and Pistoja, before he pitched his tent in Florence in 1821.
In 1835 he had an unfortunate difference with his wife which ended in a complete separation. In 1824 appeared the first series of his Imaginary Conversations, in 1826 the second edition, corrected and enlarged; a supplementary third volume was added in 1828; and in 1829 the second series was given to the world. Not until 1846 was a fresh instalment added, in the second volume of his collected and selected works.
During the interval he had published his three other most famous and greatest books in prose: The Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare (1834), Pericles and Aspasia (1836), The Pentameron (1837). To the last of these was originally appended The Pentalogia, containing five of the very finest among his shorter studies in dramatic poetry. In 1847 he published his most important Latin work, Poemata et inscriptiones, comprising, with large additions, the main contents of two former volumes of idyllic, satiric, elegiac and lyric verse; and in the same golden year of his poetic life appeared the very crown and flower of its manifold labors, the Hellenics of Walter Savage Landor, enlarged and completed. Twelve years later this book was re-issued, with additions of more or less value, with alterations generally to be regretted, and with omissions invariably to be deplored.
In 1853 he put forth The Last Fruit off an Old Tree, containing fresh conversations, critical and controversial essays, miscellaneous epigrams, lyrics and occasional poems of various kind and merit, closing with Five Scenes on the martyrdom of Beatrice Cenci, unsurpassed even by their author himself for noble and heroic pathos, for subtle and genial, tragic and profound, ardent and compassionate insight into character, with consummate mastery of dramatic and spiritual truth. In 1857 he published Antony and Octavius: Scenes for the Study, twelve consecutive poems in dialogue which alone would suffice to place him high among the few great masters of historic drama.
In 1858 appeared a metrical miscellany bearing the title of Dry Sticks Fagoted by W. S. Landor, and containing among other things graver and lighter certain epigrammatic and satirical attacks which reinvolved him in the troubles of an action for libel; and in July of the same year he returned for the last six years of his life to Italy, which he had left for England in 1835. He was advised to make over his property to his family, on whom he was now dependent. They appear to have refused to make him an allowance unless he returned to England. By the exertions of Robert Browning an allowance was secured. Browning settled him first at Siena and then at Florence. Embittered and distracted by domestic dissensions, if brightened and relieved by the affection and veneration of friends and strangers, this final period of his troubled and splendid career came at last to a quiet end on September 17, 1864. In the preceding year he had published a last volume of Heroic Idyls, with Additional Poems, English and Latin, the better part of them well worthy to be indeed the last fruit of a genius which after a life of eighty-eight years had lost nothing of its majestic and pathetic power, its exquisite and exalted loveliness. He is buried under a laurel in the 'English' Cemetery, Florence, near the tomb of his friend, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A statue of his wife can also be found in the 'English' Cemetery, above the tomb of their son, Arnold Savage Landor. Later, his Villa Gherardesca in Fiesole would become the home of the American Icelandic scholar Daniel Willard Fiske, who renamed it the 'Villa Landor'.
A complete list of Landor's writings, published or privately printed, in English, Latin and Italian, including pamphlets, fly-sheets and occasional newspaper correspondence on political or literary questions, it would be difficult to give anywhere and impossible to give here. From nineteen almost to ninety his intellectual and literary activity was indefatigably incessant; but, herein at least like Charles Lamb, whose cordial admiration he so cordially returned, he could not write a note of three lines which did not bear the mark of his Roman hand in its matchless and inimitable command of a style at once the most powerful and the purest of his age.
The one charge which can ever seriously be brought and maintained against it is that of such occasional obscurity or difficulty as may arise from excessive strictness in condensation of phrase and expurgation of matter not always superfluous, and sometimes almost indispensable. His English prose and his Latin verse are perhaps more frequently and more gravely liable to this charge than either his English verse or his Latin prose. At times it is well-nigh impossible for an eye less keen and swift, a scholarship less exquisite and ready than his own, to catch the precise direction and follow the perfect course of his rapid thought and radiant utterance.
This apparently studious pursuit and preference of the most terse and elliptic expression which could be found for anything he might have to say could not but occasionally make even so sovereign a master of two great languages appear dark with excess of light; but from no former master of either tongue in prose or verse was ever the quality of real obscurity, of loose and nebulous incertitude, more utterly alien or more naturally remote. There is nothing of cloud or fog about the path on which he leads us; but we feel now and then the want of a bridge or a handrail; we have to leap from point to point of narrative or argument withoit the usual help of a connecting plank. Even in his dramatic works, where least of all it should have been found, this lack of visible connection or sequence in details of thought or action is too often a source of sensible perplexity. In his noble trilogy on the history of Giovanna queen of Naples it is sometimes actually difficult to realize on a first reading what has happened or is happening, or how, or why, or by what agency a defect alone sufficient, but unhappily sufficient in itself, to explain the too general ignorance of a work so rich in subtle and noble treatment of character, so sure and strong in its grasp and rendering of high actions and high passions, so rich in humour and in pathos, so royally serene in its commanding power upon the tragic mainsprings of terror and of pity.
As a poet, he may be said on the whole to stand midway between Byron and Shelley--about as far above the former as below the latter. If we except Catullus and Simonides, it might be hard to match and it would be impossible to overmatch the flawless and blameless yet living and breathing beauty of his most perfect elegies, epigrams or epitaphs. As truly as prettily was he likened by Leigh Hunt to a stormy mountain pine which should produce lilies. His passionate compassion, his bitter and burning pity for all wrongs endured in all the world, found only their natural and inevitable outlet in his lifelong defence or advocacy of tyrannicide as the last resource of baffled justice, the last discharge of heroic duty. His tender and ardent love of children, of animals and of flowers makes fragrant alike the pages of his writing and the records of his life. He was as surely the most gentle and generous as the most headstrong and hot-headed of heroes or of men. Nor ever was any mans best work more thoroughly imbued and informed with evidence of his noblest qualities. His loyalty and liberality of heart were as inexhaustible as his bounty and beneficence of hand. Praise and encouragement, deserved or undeserved, came yet more readily to his lips than challenge or defiance.
Reviled and ridiculed by Lord Byron, he retorted on the offender living less readily and less warmly than he lamented and extolled him dead. On the noble dramatic works of his brother Robert (Robert Eyres Landor 1781 - 1869) he lavished sympathetic praise.
He was a classic, and no formalist; the wide range of his admiration had room for a genius so far from classical as Blake's. Nor in his own highest mood or method of creative as of critical work was he a classic only, in any narrow or exclusive sense of the term. On either side, immediately or hardly below his mighty masterpiece of Pericles and Aspasia, stand the two scarcely less beautiful and vivid studies of medieval Italy and Shakespearean England.
The very finest flower of his dialogues is probably to be found in the single volume Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans; his command of passion and pathos may be tested by its success in the distilled and concentrated tragedy of Tiberius and Vipsania, where for once he shows a quality more proper to romantic than classical imagination: the subtle and sublime and terrible power to enter the dark vestibule of distraction, to throw the whole force of his fancy, the whole fire of his spirit, into the shadowing passion (as Shakespeare calls it) of gradually imminent insanity. Yet, if this and all other studies from ancient history or legend could be subtracted from the volume of his work, enough would be left whereon to rest the foundation of a fame which time could not sensibly impair.
Landor was affectionately adapted by Charles Dickens into the character Boythorn in Bleak House.
See The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (8 vols., 1846), the life being the work of John Forster. Another edition of his works (1891–1893), edited by C. G. Crump, comprises Imaginary Conversations, Poems, Dialogues in Verse and Epigrams and The Longer Prose Works. His Letters and other Unpublished Writings were edited by Stephen Wheeler (1897). There are many volumes of selections from his works, notably one (1882) for the Golden Treasury series, edited by Sidney Colvin, who also contributed the monograph on Landor (1881) in the English Men of Letters series. A bibliography of his works, many of which are very rare, is included in Sir Leslie Stephen's article on Landor in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xxxii., 1892).
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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