dear Sévigné’s Rochers, as he would Abbotsford and Stratford. The
“fine creature,” much more alive to him than most friends, has been
his companion at the seashore. She now occupies Montaigne’s place,
and worthily; “she herself a lover of Montaigne, and with a spice of
his free thought and speech in her.” He sometimes laments not having
known her before; but reflects that “perhaps such an acquaintance
comes in best to cheer one toward the end.” Henceforward, year after
year, in spring especially, he talks of the dear lady’s charms. “My
blessed Sévigné,” “my dear old Sévigné,” he calls her; “welcome as the
flowers of May.” Like the best of Scott’s characters, she is real and
present to him. “When my oracle last night was reading to me of Dandie
Dinmont’s blessed visit to Bertram in Portanferry gaol, I said--‘I
know it’s Dandie, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised to see him come
into this room.’ No--no more than--Madame de Sévigné! I suppose it is
scarce right to live so among shadows; but after near seventy years so
passed, _que voulez-vous_?” One thinks of what Emerson said, that there
is creative reading as well as creative writing.
As is true of all readers, every kind of human capacity being limited,
FitzGerald found many likely books lying mysteriously outside the
range of his sympathies. He loved Longfellow (and so “could not call
him Mister”) and admired Emerson (with qualifications--“I don’t like
the ‘Humble Bee,’ and won’t like the ‘Humble Bee’”); and he delighted
in Lowell (the critical essays), and “rather loved” Holmes; but he
“could never take to that man of true genius, Hawthorne.” “I will have
another shot,” he said. But it was useless. He confesses his failure to
Professor Norton. “I feel sure the fault must be mine, as I feel about
Goethe, who is yet a sealed book to me.” He expects to “die ungoethed,
so far as poetry goes.” He supposes there is a screw loose in him on
this point. Again he writes: “I have failed in another attempt at
‘Gil Blas.’ I believe I see its easy grace, humor, etc. But it is
(like La Fontaine) too thin a wine for me: all sparkling with little
adventures, but no one to care about; no color, no breadth, like my
dear Don, whom I shall return to forthwith.” Happy reader, who could
give so pretty a reason for the want of faith that was in him. If he
lacked patience to write formal criticism, he had the neatest kind of
knack at critical _obiter dicta_.
Books were his best friends; or, if that be too much to say, they
were the ones that he liked best to have about him. As for human
intimates,--well, it is hard to know how to express it, but he seemed,
especially as he grew older, not to crave very much of their society.
He loved to write to them,--not too often, lest they should be troubled
about replying,--but he would never visit them; and what is stranger,
he cared little, nay, he almost dreaded, to have them visit him. His
house he devoted to his nieces, for such part of the year as they
chose to occupy it, reserving but one room to himself. This serves
for “parlor, bedroom and all,” he tells Mrs. Kemble; “which I really
prefer, as it reminds me of the cabin of my dear little ship--mine
no more.” Still the house is large enough. If any of his friends,
Tennyson, Spedding, Carlyle, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Norton, or who not,
should happen to be in the neighborhood, he would be delighted, truly
delighted, to see them; but none of them must ever undertake the
journey on purpose. He couldn’t render it worth their while, and it
would really make him unhappy. He was never in danger of forgetting
them, and he had no fear of their forgetting him. If they suffered,
he suffered with them. If one of them died, he wrote of him in the
tenderest and most poignant strain.
In January, 1864, all his letters are full of Thackeray, whose death
had occurred on the day before Christmas. He sits “moping about him,”
reading his books and the few of his letters that he has preserved.
He writes to Laurence: “I am surprised almost to find how much I am
thinking of him: so little as I had seen him for the last ten years;
not once for the last five. I had been told--by you, for one--that he
was spoiled. I am glad therefore that I have scarce seen him since he
was ‘old Thackeray.’ I keep reading his ‘Newcomes’ of nights, and as it
were hear him saying so much of it; and it seems to me as if he might
be coming up my stairs, and about to come (singing) into my room, as in
old Charlotte Street thirty years ago.”[6]
Hear him again as he writes of Spedding, the wisest man he has ever
known, “a Socrates in life and in death,” who has been run over by a
cab in London, and is dying at the hospital: “My dear old Spedding,
though I have not seen him these twenty years and more, and probably
should never see him again; but he lives, his old self, in my heart of
hearts; and all I hear of him does but embellish the recollection of
him, if it could be embellished; for he is but the same that he was
from a boy, all that is best in heart and head, a man that would be
incredible had one not known him.” And when all is over, and Laurence
sends him tidings of the event, this is his answer: “It was very, very
good of you to think of writing to me at all on this occasion: much
more, writing to me so fully, almost more fully than I dared at first
to read: though all so delicately and as you always write. It is over!
I shall not write about it. He was all you say.” How perfect! And how
it goes to the quick!
Not for want of heart, surely, did such a man choose the companionship
of books rather than of his fellows. He was born to be a solitary, or
believed that he was; at all events, it was too late now for him to be
anything else. Whether nature or he had made his bed, it was made, and
henceforth he must lie in it. “Twenty years’ solitude,” he says to Mrs.
Kemble, “makes me very shy.” And he writes to Sir Frederick Pollock,
who has proposed to visit him, that he feels nervous at the prospect
of meeting old friends, “after all these years.” He fears they will
not find him in person what he is by letter. Every recluse knows that
trouble. With books it was another story. In their presence he felt
no misgivings, no palsying diffidence. They would never expect of him
what he could not render, nor find him altered from his old self. If
he happened to be awkward or dull, as he often was, they would never
know it. And really, with them on his shelves, and with his habit of
living by himself, he did not need intellectual society,--just a few
commonplace, kindly, more or less sensible bodies to speak with in a
neighborly way about the weather, the crops, or the day’s events, and
to play cards with of an evening. He was one of the fortunates--or
unfortunates--who have a “talent for dullness.” The word is his own.
“I really do like to sit in this doleful place with a good fire, a cat
and dog on the rug, and an old woman in the kitchen.” He reveled in the
pleasures of memory. He loved his friends as they were years ago,--“old
Thackeray,” “old Jem,” “old Alfred,”--and only hoped they would love
him in the same manner.
So his letters are full of the books he has been reading, rather
than of the people he has been talking with. But what of his own
books, especially of the one that has made him famous? About that,
it must be said at once, the correspondence tells comparatively
little. His Persian studies were only an episode in his life,
interesting enough at the time, but not a continuous passion, like,
for instance, his reading of Crabbe, and his long persisted in--never
relinquished--attempt to secure for that half-forgotten Suffolk poet
the honor rightfully belonging to him. Concerning that pious attempt,
as concerning a possible republication of some of his translations
from the Spanish and the Greek, he left directions with his literary
executor; but not a word about Omar Khayyám.
The whole Persian business, indeed, if one may speak of it so, appears
to have been largely a matter of friendship, or at least to have been
begun as such. Cowell had become absorbed in that language, and enticed
his old Spanish pupil to follow him. The first mention of the subject
to be found in the published letters occurs in 1853. FitzGerald has
ordered Eastwick’s “Gulistan:” “for I believe I shall potter out so
much Persian.” Two months afterward he writes to Frederic Tennyson:
“I amuse myself with poking out some Persian which E. Cowell would
inaugurate me with. I go on with it because it is a point in common
with him, and enables us to study a little together.” Friendly feeling
has served the world many a good turn, but rarely a better one than
this.
Three or four years later comes the first reference to Omar. “Old
Omar,” he says, “rings like true metal.” Now he is translating the
quatrains, though he has little to say about them. He finds it
amusing to “take what liberties he likes with these Persians,” who,
he thinks, are not poets enough to frighten one from so doing. On a
1st of July he writes: “June over! A thing I think of with Omar-like
sorrow.” Then he is preparing to send some of the more innocent of the
quatrains to “Fraser’s Magazine,” the editor of which has asked him
for a contribution. He has begun to look upon Omar as rather more his
property than Cowell’s. “He and I are more akin, are we not?” he writes
to his teacher. “You see all his beauty, but you don’t feel _with_ him
in some respects as I do.” He is taking all pains, not for literalness,
but to make the thing _live_. It _must_ live; if not with Omar’s life,
why, then, with the translator’s. And live it did, and does,--
“The rose of Iran on an English stock.”
The Fraser story is well known,--a classical example of the rejection
of a future classic. The editor took the manuscript, but kept it in its
pigeonhole (“Thou knowest not which shall prosper” being as true a text
for editors as for other men--“Sir,” said Doctor Johnson, “a fallible
being will fail somewhere”), and at last FitzGerald asked it back,
added something to it, and printed it anonymously. This was in 1859.
He gave one copy to Cowell (who “was naturally alarmed at it; he being
a very religious man”), one copy to George Borrow, and one--a good
while afterward--to “old Donne.” Some copies he kept for himself. The
remainder, two hundred, more or less, he presented to Mr. Quaritch, who
had printed them for him, and who worked them off upon his customers,
as best he could, mostly at two cents apiece.
In the course of the next few years three other editions were
printed--all anonymously--for the sake of alterations and additions (a
man of taste is sure to be a patient reviser), but there is next to
nothing about them in the letters. No one cares for such things, the
translator says. He hardly knows why he prints them, only that he likes
to make an end of the matter. So he writes to Cowell. As for the rest
of his correspondents, they are more likely to be interested in other
things,--his garden, his boat, his reading. By 1863 he is pretty well
tired of everything Persian. “Oh dear,” he says to his teacher, “when
I look at Homer, Dante and Virgil, Æschylus, Shakespeare, etc., those
Orientals look--silly! Don’t resent my saying so. _Don’t_ they?” An
English masterpiece had been made, but neither the maker of it nor any
one else had yet suspected the fact.
The merits of the work seem to have been first publicly recognized in
1869 by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, in an article contributed to the
“North American Review.” “The work of a poet inspired by the work of
a poet,” he pronounces it; “not a copy, but a reproduction, not a
translation, but the redelivery of a poetic inspiration.” “There is
probably nothing in the mass of English translations or reproductions
of the poetry of the East to be compared with this little volume in
point of value as _English_ poetry. In the strength of rhythmical
structure, in force of expression, in musical modulation, and in
mastery of language, the external character of the verse corresponds
with the still rarer qualities of imagination and of spiritual
discernment which it displays.”
It would be pleasant to know how appreciation of this kind, coming
unexpectedly from a stranger over seas, affected the still anonymous,
obscurity-loving translator; but if he ever read it, or, having read
it, said anything about it, the letters make no sign. He and his work
were still comfortably obscure. His old friend Carlyle heard not a word
about the matter till 1873, when Professor Norton, who meanwhile had
somehow discovered the name of the man he had been praising, mentioned
the poem to him, and insisted upon giving him a copy. Carlyle, much
pleased, at once wrote to FitzGerald a letter which was undoubtedly
meant to be very kind and handsome, but which, read in the light of the
present, sounds a little perfunctory, and even a bit patronizing. The
translation, he says, is a “meritorious and successful performance.”
We can almost fancy that we are listening to a good-natured but
truthful man who feels it his duty to speak well of a pretty good
composition written by a fairly bright grammar school boy.
It was all one to FitzGerald. Perhaps he thought the compliment as good
as he deserved. He was getting old--as he had been doing for the last
twenty-five years. Persian poetry was little or nothing to him now--“a
ten years’ dream.” The fruit had dropped from the tree; let the earth
care for it. So he returns to his Crabbe, to Sainte-Beuve, to Madame de
Sévigné, to Don Quixote, to Wesley’s Journal, and the rest. Such little
time as he has to live, he will live quietly. And ten years afterward,
when he died,--suddenly, as he had always hoped,--some one put on his
gravestone that most Omaric of Scripture texts, “It is He that hath
made us, and not we ourselves.” Perhaps the words were of his own
choosing. Certainly no others could have suited him so well. If he had
been eccentric, idle, unambitious, ease-loving, incapable, a pitcher
“leaning all awry,” he had been what the Potter made him.
“The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the Field,
He knows about it all--HE knows--HE knows!”
Since his death his fame has increased mightily. All the world reads
Omar Khayyám and praises FitzGerald. “His strange genius, so fitfully
and coyly revealed, has given a new quality to English verse, almost
all recent manifestations of which it pervades.” So says one of the
later historians of our nineteenth century literature. And the man
himself thought he had done nothing! Truly the race is not to the swift.
“Behold the Grace of Allah comes and goes
As to Itself is good: and no one knows
Which way it turns: in that mysterious Court
Not he most finds who furthest travels for ’t,
For one may crawl upon his knees Life-long,
And yet may never reach, or all go wrong:
Another just arriving at the Place
He toiled for, and--the Door shut in his Face:
Whereas Another, scarcely gone a Stride,
And suddenly--Behold he is inside!”
THOREAU
THOREAU
“Whoever will do his own work aright will find that his first
lesson is to know what he is, and that which is proper to himself;
and whoever rightly understands himself will never mistake another
man’s work for his own, but will love and improve himself above all
other things, will refuse superfluous employments, and reject all
unprofitable thoughts and propositions.”
MONTAIGNE.
It lay at the root of Thoreau’s peculiarity that he insisted upon
being himself. Having certain opinions, he held them; having certain
tastes, he encouraged them; having a certain faculty, he made the
most of it: all of which, natural and reasonable as it may sound, is
as far as possible from what is expected of the average citizen, who
may be almost anything he will, to be sure, if he will first observe
the golden rule of good society, to be “like other folks.” Society
is still a kind of self-constituted militia, a mutual protective
association,--an army, in short; and in an army, as everybody knows,
the first duty of man is to keep step.
What made matters worse in Thoreau’s case was, that his tastes and
opinions, on which he so stoutly insisted, were in themselves far out
of the common. Not only would he be himself, enough, under present
conditions, to make almost any man an oddity, but the “himself” was
essentially a very queer person. He liked solitude; in other words, he
liked to think. He loved the society of trees and all manner of growing
things. He found fellowship in them, they were of his kin; which is not
at all the same as to say that he enjoyed looking at them as objects
of beauty. He lived in a world of his own, a world of ideas, and was
strangely indifferent to much that other men found absorbing. He could
get along without a daily newspaper, but not without a daily walk. He
spent hours and hours of honest daylight in what looked for all the
world like idleness; and he did it industriously and on principle.
He was more anxious to live well--according to an inward standard of
his own--than to lodge well, or to dress well, or to stand well with
his townsmen. A good name, even, was relatively unimportant. He found
easy sundry New Testament scriptures which the church would still be
stumbling over, only that it has long since worn a smooth path round
them.
He set a low value on money. It _might_ be of service to him, he once
confessed, underscoring the doubt, but in general he accepted poverty
as the better part. “We are often reminded,” he said, “that if there
were bestowed on us the wealth of Crœsus, our aims must still be the
same, and our means essentially the same.” Houses and lands, even, as
he considered them, were often no better than incumbrances. Some of his
well-to-do, highly respected, self-satisfied neighbors were as good as
in prison, he thought. In what sense were men to be called free, if
their “property” had put them under bonds to stay in such and such a
place and do only such and such things? Life was more than meat, as he
reckoned, and having trained himself to “strict business habits” (his
own words), he did not believe in swapping a better thing for a poorer
one. To him it was amazing that hard-headed, sensible men should stand
at a desk the greater part of their days, and “glimmer and rust, and
finally go out there.” “If they _know_ anything,” he exclaimed, “what
under the sun do they do that for?” He speaks as if the question were
unanswerable; but no doubt many readers will find it easy enough,
the only real difficulty being a deplorable scarcity of desks. For
Thoreau’s part, at any rate, other men might save dollars if they
would; he meant to save his soul. It should not glimmer and rust and go
out, if a manly endeavor was good for anything. And he saved it. To the
end he kept it alive; and though he died young, he lived a long life
and did a long life’s work, and what is more to the present purpose, he
left behind him a long memory.
His economies, which were so many and so rigorous, were worthy of a
man. In kind, they were such as any man must practice who, having a
task assigned him, is set upon doing it. If the river is to run the
mill, it must contract itself. The law is general. To make sure of the
best we must put away not only whatever is bad, but many things that of
themselves are good,--a right hand, if need be, or a right eye, said
one of old. For the artist, indeed, as for the saint,--for all seekers
after perfection, that is,--the good and the best are often the most
uncompromising of opposites, by no means to be entertained under the
same roof. Manage it as we will, to receive one is to dismiss the other.
Rightly considered, Thoreau’s singularity consisted, not in his
lodging in a cabin, nor in his wearing coarse clothes, nor in his
non-observance of so-called social amenities, nor even in his passion
for the wild, but in his view of the world and of his own place
in it. He was a poet-naturalist, an idealist, an individualist, a
transcendental philosopher, what you will; but first of all he was a
prophet. “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” he might
have said; and the locusts and wild honey followed as things of course.
It followed, also, that the fathers neglected him,--stoning having gone
out of fashion,--and the children garnish his sepulchre. A prophet is a
very worthy person--after he is dead. Then come biographies, eulogies,
and new editions of his works, including his journals and private
letters. Fame is a plant that blossoms on graves; as a manual of such
botany might say, “a late-flowering perennial, nowhere common, to be
looked for in old cemeteries.”
A prophet, a writer, a student of nature: this was Thoreau, and the
three were one.
He preached faith, simplicity, devotion to the ideal; and with all a
prophet’s freedom he denounced everything antagonistic to these. He was
not one of those nice people who are contented to speak handsomely of
God and say nothing about the devil. It was not in his nature to halt
between two opinions. He could always say yes or no--especially no. As
was said of Pascal, there were no middle terms in his philosophy.
Withal, no man was more of a believer and less of a skeptic. Faith
and hope, “infinite expectation,” were his daily breath. Charity was
his, also, but less conspicuously, and after a pattern of his own,
philanthropy, as he saw it practiced, being one of his prime aversions.
He knew not the meaning of pessimism. The world was good. “I am
grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.” To the
final hour existence was a boon to him. “For joy I could embrace the
earth,” he declared, though he seldom indulged himself in emotional
expression; “I shall delight to be buried in it.” “It was not possible
to be sad in his presence,” said his sister, speaking of his last
illness. His may have been “a solitary and critical way of living,” to
quote Emerson’s careful phrase, but in his work there is little trace
of anything morbid or unwholesome. Some who might hesitate to rank
themselves among his disciples keep by them a copy of “Walden,” or the
“Week,” to dip into for refreshment and invigoration when life runs
low and desire begins to fail. Readers of this kind please him better,
we may guess, if he knows of them, than those who skim his pages for
the natural history and the scenery. Such is the fate of prophets. The
fulminations and entreaties of Isaiah are now highly recommended as
specimens of Oriental _belles-lettres_. Yet worse things may befall
a man than to be partially appreciated. As Thoreau himself said: “It
is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their
sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the
practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either
the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a
full stream.” His own was hardly a “full stream,” perhaps; a mountain
brook rather than one of the world’s rivers; clear, cold, running from
the spring, untainted by the swamp; less majestic than the Amazons, but
not less unfailing, and for those who can climb, and who know the taste
of purity, infinitely sweeter to drink from.