own choice. “Men ought to have an ambition to stir and travel, and
fill their heads and senses.” So he says once, in an unusual mood
of something like penitence. Even then, however, he concludes,
characteristically, “but so it is.” There speaks the real FitzGerald.
He is what he is, what he was made: a man without ambition; a man
incapable, from first to last, of taking himself seriously. He
could never have said, as Tennyson did in his youth, and in effect
for all his life, “I mean to be famous.” If FitzGerald meant to be
anything,--which is doubtful,--he meant to be obscure. The wonder
of it all is that his life was beautiful, his spirit sweet, and his
posthumous reward celebrity.
He had little or none of the melancholy which so generally accompanies
the union of exceptional powers with an enfeebled will and a
comparative intellectual sterility. For one thing, he seems to have
been spared the persecution of friends. As he expected little of
himself, so they expected little of him. Unlike most men of a kindred
sort--men of whom Gray and Amiel may stand as typical examples--he was
left to go his own gait. Nobody wrote to him week after week, chiding
him for his indolence and entreating him to produce a masterpiece.
Happy man that he was, his youth had held out no promise of such
production, and so his subsequent course was not clouded by the shadow
of a promise unfulfilled. If he was down in the country letting the
moss grow over him, why, it was only “old Fitz,” from whom nobody had
ever looked for anything very different. So Thackeray, Tennyson, and
the rest seem to have thought. And so thought the man himself. Life
was worth living; oh yes; and he had “got hold of a good end of it;”
but it was hardly a thing to disquiet one’s self about. He set little
value upon time or money, and correspondingly little upon his own
gifts. There were always hours enough, and more than enough, for the
nothings he had to do; his income was sufficient; if it declined,--as
it did,--it was no matter, he had only to reduce his expenditures;
he never earned a penny, or considered the possibility of doing so;
and withal, he was not made to write anything himself, but to please
himself with the writings of others.
He was born of the school of Epicurus. His aim was to pass the time
quietly; pitching his desires low, never overmuch in earnest, taking
things as they came,--
“Crowning the present, doubting of the rest;”
“not a hero, not even a philosopher, but a quiet, humane, and prudent
man;” cultivating no enthusiasm, and aiming at no perfection. For
fifty years he seems to have been a consistent vegetarian. Like the
master of his school,--whom he seldom or never mentions, and of whom
he perhaps as seldom thought,--he subsisted mostly on bread, and drank
wine sparingly. Such a diet gave him lightness of spirits, he said,--a
better thing, surely, than any tickling of the palate.
With his liking for the country--in which, again, he was at one with
his unrecognized master--went a strong and persistent preference for
the society of common people. For correspondents he had always scholars
and men of note, the best of his time, and many of them; for daily
associates he chose a sailor, a village clergyman’s family, and an old
woman or two. One of the greatest men he had ever known was his sailor,
the captain of his yacht,--“my captain,” he calls him; “a gentleman
of nature’s grandest type,” “fit to be king of a kingdom as well as
of a lugger.” From Lowestoft he sends word to Laurence, the portrait
painter, “I came here a few days ago, for the benefit of my old doctor,
the sea, and my captain’s company, which is as good.” One who knew
him at the time of his intimacy with Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet
(fortunate Quaker, with Lamb and FitzGerald both writing letters to
him!), describes him as living in a little cottage at Boulge, a mile
from the village, on the edge of his father’s park, with no companion
save a parrot and a Skye terrier. Such domestic duties as he did not
attend to with his own hands were performed by an “old-fashioned
Suffolk woman.” It was at this period that FitzGerald--then
thirty-three years old--wrote to Barton, “I believe I should like to
live in a small house just outside a pleasant English town all the days
of my life, making myself useful in a humble way, reading my books, and
playing a rubber of whist at night.” And it may be added that few men
have ever come nearer to realizing their own dream.
The Hall was mostly unoccupied in those days, though “the great
lady”--FitzGerald’s mother--would be there once in a while, and “would
drive about in a coach of four black horses.” So says the son of the
village rector, who adds that FitzGerald “used to walk by himself,
slowly, with a Skye terrier.” The rector’s son (a grandson, by-the-bye,
of the poet Crabbe) was rather afraid of his “grave, middle-aged”
neighbor. “He seemed a proud and very punctilious man ... never very
happy or light-hearted, though his conversation was most amusing
sometimes.” On this last point we have also the testimony of his
housekeeper, the “old-fashioned Suffolk woman” before mentioned. “So
kind he was,” she says; “not never one to make no obstacles. Such a
joking gentleman he was, too!” All his dependents, indeed, speak of his
kindness. A boy of the village, who was employed to read to him in the
evening during his later years, told Mr. Groome[4] “how Mr. FitzGerald
always gave him plenty of plum cake, and how they used to play piquet
together. Only sometimes a tame mouse would come out and sit on the
table, and then not a card must be dropped.” “A pretty picture,” Mr.
Groome calls it. And so say we.
As to the picture of FitzGerald’s manner of life taken as a whole, it
will be thought “pretty” or not according to the prepossessions of the
reader. To many it will seem in all respects amiable, a refreshment
to read about. Why should a man not be what he was made to be? If he
likes the heat of battle, let him fight, so that he does it fairly
and with those who enjoy the same game. If another man cares not to
be strenuous, but only to pass his day innocently, with pleasure to
himself and harm to nobody else,--why, the world is big enough; let him
be at liberty to sit in his corner and see the crowd go by.
“‘An hour we have,’ thou saidst. ‘Ah, waste it well.’”
And after all, the idler may reach the goal as soon as some who hurry.
The race ought to be his who has trained hardest and run hardest;
and it would be, perhaps, if the world were logically and properly
governed; but things being as they are, the experience of mankind seems
to show a measure of truth in the old Hebrew paradox, “The race is not
to the swift.” Whether it is or not, the question had no particular
interest for FitzGerald. His thoughts were not of winning a prize.
His temperament had put him out of the competition. Temperament is
fatality; and he was content to have it so. “It is not my talent,” he
said, “to take the tide at its flow.” In his “predestined Plot of Dust
and Soul” the vine of worldly prudence had never struck root.
He was peculiar in other ways. He was constitutionally a skeptic. Many
things which he had been taught to believe seemed to him insufficiently
established; improbable, if not incredible. The Master of Trinity wrote
of him and of one of his dearest friends, “Two of the purest-living
men among my intimates, FitzGerald and Spedding, were prisoners in
Doubting Castle all their lives, or at least the last half of them.”
The language is euphemistic. Some calamities are so deeply felt that it
is natural to veil allusion to them under metaphor. His friends, the
Master means to say, had lost their faith in the tenets of the English
Church. “A great problem,” he pronounces it. And such it surely was:
that two such men--“pure-living men!”--should doubt of matters which
to so many bishops, priests, and deacons are the very certainties of
existence. But so it is. Some men seem to be born for unbelief; and out
of that number a few are so non-conformative, so perverse, or so honest
as to live according to their lights. Concerning questions of this
kind FitzGerald said little either in public or private. An unheroic,
peace-loving man, who wishes to slip through the world unnoticed,
naturally keeps some thoughts to himself, growing them, to borrow
Keats’s phrase, in “a philosophic back-garden.” He reasoned about them,
it would seem, in a quiet spirit, patient, perhaps half indifferent,
being happily free from any corroding curiosity as to the origin and
destiny of things. In that regard Nature had been good to him. What
could not be known, he could get on without knowing. Why wear out
one’s teeth in champing an iron bit? He spoke his mind, anonymously,
in his translation of the Omar Khayyám quatrains,--which are perhaps
rather more skeptical than the book of Ecclesiastes,--and once, at
least, he shut the lips of a man whom he thought a meddler. The rector
of Woodbridge, we are told by Mr. Groome, called on FitzGerald to
express his regret at never seeing him at church. We may surmise that
the “regret” was expressed in a rather lofty and dogmatic tone, a tone
not unnatural, surely, in the case of one clothed with supernatural
authority. “Sir,” said FitzGerald, whose fondness for clergymen’s
society was one of his marked characteristics, “you might have
conceived that a man has not come to my years without thinking much of
these things. I believe I may say that I have reflected on them fully
as much as yourself. You need not repeat this visit.”
His correspondence, by which mainly the world knows him, is full of
interesting revelations. His whims and foibles, and his own gentle
amusement over them; his bookish likes and dislikes, one as hearty as
the other; his affection for his friends, whose weak points he could
sometimes lay a pretty sharp finger on, notwithstanding, frankness
being almost always one of an odd man’s virtues; his delight in the
sea and in his garden (“Don’t you love the oleander? I rather worship
mine,” he writes to Mrs. Kemble); his pottering over translations from
the Spanish, the Persian, and the Greek (“all very well; only very
little affairs:” he feels “ashamed” when his friend Thompson inquires
about them); his music, wherein his taste was simple but difficult (he
played without technique and sang without a voice, loving to “recollect
some of ‘Fidelio’ on the pianoforte,” and counting it more enjoyable
“to perform in one’s head one of Handel’s choruses” than to hear most
Exeter Hall performances),--all these things, and many more, come
out in his letters, which are never anything _but_ letters, written
to please his friends,--and himself,--with no thought of anything
beyond that. In them we see his life passing. He is trifling it away;
but no matter. He might do more with it, perhaps; but _cui bono_? At
the end of his summer touring he writes: “A little Bedfordshire--a
little Northamptonshire--a little more folding of the hands--the same
faces--the same fields--the same thoughts occurring at the same turns
of road--this is all I have to tell of; nothing at all added--but the
summer gone. My garden is covered with yellow and brown leaves; and a
man is digging up the garden beds before my window, and will plant some
roots and bulbs for next year. My parsons come and smoke with me.” What
age does the reader give to the author of this paragraph, so full of
afternoon shadows? He was thirty-five.
But if he was an idle fellow, careful for nothing, poor in spirit,
contented to be the hindmost, devil or no devil, “reading a little,
dreaming a little, playing a little, smoking a little,” doing whatever
he did “a little,” he was not without a kind of faith in his own
capacity. He knew, or believed that he knew, what he was good for.
“I am a man of taste,” he said more than once. If he could not write
poetry,--taste being only “the feminine of genius,”--he knew it when
he saw it. He read books with his own eyes, not half so common or
easy a trick as many would suppose. And having read a book in that
unconventional way, it was by no means to be taken for granted that
he would like it, though its author might be one of his dearest
friends. And if he failed to like it, he seldom failed to say so. If
he commended a book,--a new book, that is,--it was apt to be with a
mixture of criticism. He cared little or nothing for flattery himself,
and was magnanimous enough to assume (an enormous assumption) that
literary workers in general were equally high-minded. If one friend
sends another a book of his own writing, the best course for the
second man is merely to acknowledge its receipt, unless he has some
fault to indicate! This he sets down quite simply as his belief and
ordinary practice. It was the more comfortable way for both parties,
he thought. Perhaps he thought, too, that it was the more conducive to
habits of truthfulness. (Others might conclude that its most immediate
and permanent effect would be to discourage the circulation of authors’
copies.) If he considered Mr. Lowell’s odes to lack wings, he told Mr.
Lowell so. If his taste was offended by the style of the “Moosehead
Journal” (“too clever by half”), he told Mr. Lowell of that also. Why
not? Great men did not resent truth-speaking, but were thankful for
it. He was full of wonder and sorrow when he saw Tennyson--who had
stopped at Woodbridge for a day to visit him, after a separation of
twenty years--fretted by the “Quarterly’s” unfavorable comments. If
Tennyson had lived an active life, like Scott and Shakespeare, he would
have done more and talked about it less. He recalls Scott’s saying to
Lockhart, “You know that I don’t care a curse about what I write;”
and he believed that it was not far otherwise with Shakespeare. “Even
old Wordsworth, wrapt up in his mountain mists, and proud as he was,
was above all this vain disquietude.” If a man is not greater than the
greatest things he does, the less said about him and them the better.
His work should drop from him like fruit from a tree. Henceforth let
the world look after it, if it is worth looking after. The tree should
have other business.
To say that FitzGerald lived in accordance with his own doctrine
in this regard is to say that he lived like a man of dignity and
high self-respect,--like an old-fashioned man,--sometimes called a
gentleman,--one is tempted to say: a man who would cut off his hand
sooner than solicit a vote, or angle for a compliment, or whimper
over a criticism. Old-fashioned he certainly was,--old-fashioned and
conservative. He liked old books, old music, old places, old friends.
The adjective is constantly on the point of his pen as a word of
endearment: “old Alfred,” “old Thackeray,” “old Spedding”--“dear old
Jem.” So, writing to Mrs. Kemble from the seacoast, he says, “Why
it happens that I so often write to you from here, I scarce know;
only that one comes with few books, perhaps, and the sea somehow
talks to one of old things;” which was not an unhandsome tribute to
an old friend, though the old friend was a woman. He was a “little
Englander,” as the word is now. For a nation, as for an individual,
great estates were, he thought, more a trouble than a blessing. “Once
more I say, would we were a little, peaceful, unambitious, trading
nation, like--the Dutch!” Men of taste are naturally conservatives and
moderates.
Not that FitzGerald was too nice for the world he lived in. His
carelessness about dress, his contentment with mean lodgings, and his
liking for the plainest and homeliest service and companionship have
already been touched upon. Even in the matter of reading, while he held
pretty strictly to the classics (not meaning the Greek and the Latin
in particular), he cherished one bit of freakishness: a great fondness
for the “Newgate Calendar”! “I don’t ever wish to see and hear these
things tried; but when they are in print, I like to sit in court then,
and see the judges, counsel, prisoners, crowd; hear the lawyers’
objections, the murmur in the court, etc.” So he writes to his friend
Allen, at fifty-six. And the passion remained with him, as most things
do that are part of a man’s life at fifty odd; for fourteen years later
he writes to Mrs. Kemble, as of a matter well understood among his
friends: “I like, you know, a good murder; but in its place--
‘The charge is prepared; the lawyers are met--
The judges all ranged, a terrible show.’”[5]
It may be that on this point he was not so very eccentric. Certainly
our newspaper editors give the general public credit for having
a reasonably good appetite for capital cases. And FitzGerald’s
weakness--if it was a weakness--is curiously matched by what we are
told of another eminent translator, the man to whom we owe our English
Plato and Thucydides. A shy student, Mr. Tollemache says, happened to
sit next to Jowett at dinner, and having hard work to maintain the
conversation, as such men often had, in Jowett’s unresponsive company,
stumbled upon the subject of murder. “To his surprise the Master
rose to the bait, mentioned some _causes célèbres_, and dropped all
formality.” Naturally the young Oxonian was surprised; but when he
spoke of the incident to a man who knew the Master of Balliol better
than he, the latter said, “If you can get Jowett to talk of murders, he
will go off like a house on fire.”
There is something of the savage ancestor in all of us. We are wrong,
perhaps, to feel astonished that men of the cloister, studious men,
never called upon to kill so much as a superfluous kitten, should
find an agreeable excitement in a dramatic, second-hand tickling of
certain half-dormant sensibilities. If it is ghastly good fun to read
of murder in Scott or Dumas, why not in the “Newgate Calendar”? Who
knows how many tender-hearted, white-handed scholars would enjoy the
spectacle of a prize-fight, if only the amusement were a few shades
more respectable in the public eye? And how long is it since we saw
college men falling over one another in a mad rush to enlist for
battle, every one in a fever of anxiety lest he should be too late, and
so be debarred from the unusual pleasure of killing and being killed?
No! When FitzGerald called himself a man of taste, he did not mean
to confess himself an intellectual prig, with a schoolmaster’s eye
for petty failings and a super-refined disrelish for everything short
of perfection. As for perfection, indeed, he did not much expect it,
whether in human beings or in their works; and when he found it, he
did not always like it. He thought some other things were better. He
preferred genius to art: that is to say, he enjoyed high qualities,
though accompanied by defects, better than lower qualities cultivated
to a state of flawlessness. “The grandest things,” he believed, “do
not depend on delicate finish.” Thus in poetry he admired a score of
Béranger’s almost perfect songs, but would have given them all for a
score of Burns’s couplets, stanzas, or single lines scattered among
“his quite _im_perfect lyrics.” Burns had so much more genius, so
much more inspiration. In the same way FitzGerald had little patience
with some perfect novels,--with Miss Austen’s, to be more specific.
They _were_ perfect; yes, he had no thought of denying that; but they
did not interest him. Even Trollope’s were more to his mind, with all
their caricature and carelessness. Miss Austen is “capital as far as
she goes; but she never goes out of the parlor.” “If Magnus Troil, or
Jack Bunce, or even one of Fielding’s brutes, would but dash in upon
the gentility and swear a round oath or two!” Cowell, he adds, reads
Miss Austen at night after his Sanskrit studies. “It composes him, like
gruel.”
There is no doubt of it, FitzGerald was old-fashioned, especially
as a novel-reader. He doted on Clarissa Harlowe, “that wonderful
and aggravating Clarissa Harlowe,” and he read Dickens. “A little
Shakespeare--a cockney Shakespeare, if you will ... a piece of pure
genius.” So he breaks out after a chapter of Copperfield. “I have
been sunning myself in Dickens,” he says at another time. A pretty
compliment that, for any man. It is good to hear his praise of Scott.
Even those who can no longer abide that romancer themselves--for there
are such, unaccountable as the fact may seem to happier men--may well
feel a touch of warmth at FitzGerald’s fire. He read fiction--as he
read everything else--for pleasure; and in English no other fiction
pleased him so much, taking the years together, as Sir Walter’s. In
1871 he has been reading “The Pirate” again. He knows it is not one
of the best, but he is glad to find how much he likes it; nay, that
is below the mark, how he “wonders and delights in it.” “With all its
faults, often mere carelessness, what a broad Shakespearean daylight
over it all, and all with no effort.” He finished it with sadness,
thinking he might never read it again.
And as he was always reading Scott, and as often praising him, so he
was always reading and praising Don Quixote. In 1867 he has been on his
yacht. “I have had Don Quixote, Boccaccio, and my dear Sophocles (once
more) for company on board: the first of these so delightful that I got
to love the very dictionary in which I had to look out the words: yes,
and often the same words over and over again. The book really seemed
to me the most delightful of all books: Boccaccio delightful too, but
millions of miles behind; in fact, a whole planet away.” In 1876 his
mind is the same. “I have taken refuge from the Eastern Question in
Boccaccio.... I suppose one must read this in Italian as my dear Don in
Spanish: the language of each fitting the subject ‘like a glove.’ But
there is nothing to come up to the Don and his Man.”
Bookishness of this affectionate, enthusiastic sort, constantly
recurring, would be enough of itself to give the letters a welcome; for
every reader loves to hear books praised at first hand, the man rather
than the critic speaking, even though they be such as lie outside the
too narrow limits of his own appreciation. Happiness is contagious, and
it is better than nothing, as was said just now, to warm one’s self at
another’s fire.
FitzGerald’s relations with books (with _his_ books) were those of a
lover. He can never say all he feels about Virgil. Horace he is unable
to care about, in spite of his good sense, elegance, and occasional
force. “He never made my eyes wet as Virgil does.” When he reads
“Comus” and “Lycidas,” even at seventy, it is “with wonder and a sort
of awe.” Surely he was a man of taste; born to be an appreciator of
other men’s good work.
And because he was a man of taste,--or partly for that reason,--his
praise, even in its warmest and most personal expression (like the
words just quoted about Virgil), has not only no taint of affectation,
but no suggestion of sentimentality. With him, as with all healthy
souls, feeling was a matter of moments; it came in jets, not in a
stream; and its outgiving was always with a note of unconsciousness, of
deep and absolute sincerity. His life, inward and outward, was pitched
in a low key. He never complained, let what would happen; he had too
much of “old Omar’s consolation” for that (too much fatalism, that is);
his own weaknesses, even, he took as they were; why regret what was
past mending? but his prevailing mood was anything but rhapsodical.
All the more effective, therefore, are the outbursts--frequent, but
never more than a sentence or two together--in which he utters himself
touching those best of all companions, his “friends on the shelf.”
The most striking instance of this affectionate absorption, this
falling in love with a book, as one cannot help calling it, occurred
in the last decade of his life. In the summer of 1875, when his health
seemed to be failing, and he was beginning, as he said, to “smell the
ground,” he suddenly became enamored of Madame de Sévigné. Till then,
in spite of his favorite Sainte-Beuve, he had kept aloof from her,
repelled by her perpetual harping on her daughter. Now he finds that
“it is all genuine, and the same intense feeling expressed in a hundred
natural yet graceful ways; and beside all this such good sense, good
feeling, humor, love of books and country life, as makes her certainly
the queen of all letter-writers.”