with "the universality of his mind," he could not help seeing many sides
of a question. But he "followed the Gleam," as he has himself described.
FitzGerald did the opposite. He drifted, he dallied, he delayed, he
despaired. He ruined his own life in great measure by his marriage. His
early ambitions seemed to wither prematurely, and he let his career slide.
Yet he was always, as Mr. A. C. Benson has excellently brought out,
admirable in his sincerity, his friendly kindliness, his innocence, his
conscientious adherence to his literary standards. Too much has been made
of his unconventionality, his slovenliness and slackness, his love of low
or common company. He remained a gentleman and a man of business.
Thackeray, a man of the world, when he was starting for America, wanted to
leave him the legal guardian of his daughters. He was an Epicurean, not a
Pyrrhonist. He took life seriously. He showed at times an austerity of
spirit which was surprising. His _Omar_ has often, and naturally, been
compared to Lucretius and to Ecclesiastes. There is probably more of
Lucretius about the poem, but more of Ecclesiastes about the translator.
There is another Epicurean, with whose tenets he might have been thought
to show even more sympathy--the easy-going poet-critic Horace. _Vitae
summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam_ is the constant burden of
FitzGerald's strain. His friendship, early formed, with Tennyson, the
contrast of their divergent views, might be compared with the friendship
of Horace and Virgil. For Virgil, too, began as an Epicurean. But
FitzGerald was not content with Horace. "Why is it," he wrote, "that I can
never take up with Horace, so sensible, agreeable, elegant, and sometimes
even grand?" It was, perhaps, just that masculine and worldly element that
put him off. Yet he not seldom quotes Horace, and perhaps liked him better
than he knew. "_Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret_," he wrote
in a copy of Polonius which he gave to a special friend, and Nature was
what he was always seeking in poetry. Still he preferred Virgil, just as
he really preferred Tennyson.
Though he was destined to produce a poem which bids as fair for
immortality as any of its time, he did not think highly of his own powers
as a poet. But he did plume himself on being a critic. "I pretend to no
Genius," he said, "but to Taste, which according to my aphorism is the
feminine of Genius." This was another gift in common. Tennyson was himself
a consummate critic, as FitzGerald was the first to recognize.
FitzGerald had his limitations and his prejudices--his "crotchets." He did
not like many even of those whom the world has agreed to admire. He did
not like Euripides or even Homer. With Goethe's poems he could not get on.
He eschewed Victor Hugo. He liked, indeed, very little of the prose and
none of the poetry of his contemporaries, except that of the Tennysons. He
could not away with Browning. Arnold, he wrote down "a pedant." He thought
very little of Rossetti and Swinburne, though the former, especially, was
a great admirer not only of _Omar_ but of _Jami_ and some of the Spanish
translations. He tried to read Morris's _Jason_, but said, "No go." He
"could not read the _Adam Bedes_ and the _Daisy Chains_." All this must
be remembered when we read his criticism of Tennyson's later work which
belonged to the period of these writers and their productions. But within
certain limits he was a very fine critic. It cannot be said of him as of
his special favourite among Greek poets, Sophocles, that
He saw life steadily and saw it whole.
As he was aware himself, he by no means saw it whole. But with his
detachment and his critical gift, it may, perhaps, be said:
He saw life lazily, but saw it plain.
To the question of Browning's merits, or want of merits, he is always
returning. A very characteristic letter is a long, discursive one, written
to Tennyson himself in 1867:
MARKETHILL, WOODBRIDGE,
_November 3rd, 1867_.
MY DEAR OLD ALFRED--I abuse Browning myself; and get others to abuse
him; and write to you about it; for the sake of easing my own
heart--not yours. Why is it (as I asked Mrs. Tennyson) that, while the
Magazine critics are belauding him, _not one_ of the men I know, who
are not inferior to the writers in the Athenæum, Edinburgh, etc., can
_endure_, and (for the most part) can read him at all? I mean his last
poem. Thus it has been with the Cowells, Trinity Thompsons, Donnes,
and some others whom you don't know, but in whose candour and judgment
I have equal confidence, men and women too.
Since I wrote to your wife, Pollock, a great friend of Browning's,
writes to me. "I agree with you about Browning and A. T. I can't
understand it. _Ter conatus eram_ to get through the Ring and the
Book--and failing to perform the feat in its totality, I have stooped
to the humiliation to point out extracts for me (they having read it
_all quite through_ three times) and still could not do it. So I
pretend to have read it, and let Browning so suppose when I talk to
him about it. But don't you be afraid"? (N.B. I am _not_, only angry)
"things will come round, and A. T. will take his right place again,
and R. B. will have all the honours due to his learning, wit and
philosophy."
Then I had the curiosity to ask Carlyle in my yearly letter to him. He
also is, or was, a friend of B.'s, and used to say that he looked on
him as a sort of light-cavalry man to follow you. Well, Carlyle
writes, "Browning's book I read--_insisted_ on reading: it is full of
talent, of energy, and effort, but totally without _backbone_, or
basis of common sense. I think among the absurdest books ever written
by a gifted man." (Italics are his.)
Who, then, are the people that write the nonsense in the Reviews? I
believe the reason at the bottom is that R. B. is a clever London
diner-out, etc., while A. T. holds aloof from the newspaper men, etc.
"Long life to him!" But I don't understand why Venables, or some of
the men who think as I do, and wield trenchant pens in high places,
why they don't come out, and set all this right. I only wish I could
do it: but I can only see the right thing, but not prove it to others.
"I do not like you, Dr. Fell," etc.
I found a Memorandum the other day (I can't now light on it) of a
Lincolnshire story about "Haxey Wood" or "Haxey Hood"--which--if I had
not told it to you, but left it as by chance in your way some thirty
years ago, you would have turned into a shape to outlast all R. B.'s
poems put together. There is no use in my finding and sending it now,
because it doesn't do (with Paltry Poets) to try and drag them to the
water. The two longest and worst tales (I think) in Crabbe's Tales of
the Hall, were suggested to him by Sir S. Romilly, and "a lady in
Wiltshire." I wish Murray would let me make a volume of "Selections
from Crabbe"--which I know I could, so that _common_ readers would
wish to read the whole original; which now scarce any one does; nor
can one wonder they do not. But Crabbe will flourish when R. B. is
dead and buried. Lots of lines which he cut out of his MS. would be
the beginning of a little fortune to others. I happened on this
couplet the other day:
The shapeless purpose of a soul that feels,
And half suppresses wrath and half reveals.
Not that Crabbe is to live by single couplets or epigrams, but by
something far better, as you know better than I. There is a long
passage in the Tales of the Hall (Old Bachelor) which always reminds
me of you, A. T., where the Old Bachelor recounts how he pleaded with
his Whig father to be allowed to marry the Tory Squire's daughter;
when,
Coolly my father looked, and much enjoy'd
The broken eloquence his eye destroy'd, etc.
and then pleads to the Tory mother of the girl.
Methinks I have the tigress in my eye, etc.
Do look at this, A. T., when you get the Book, and don't let my praise
set you against it.
I have written you a very long letter, you see, with one very bad eye
too. I thought it had mended, by help of cold water and goggles; but
these last three days it has turned rusty again. I believe it misses
the sea air.
[Greek: deinôn t' aêma pneumatôn ekoimise[21]
stenonta ponton.]
Do you quite understand this [Greek: ekoimise]? But what lines,
understood or not! The two last words go alongside of my little ship
with me many a time. Well, Alfred, neither you, nor the Mistress, are
to answer this letter, which I still hope may please you, as it is
(all the main part) written very loyally, and is all true. Now,
good-bye, and remember me as your old
E. F. G.
_Ne cherchez point, Iris, à percer les ténèbres[22]
Dont les Dieux sagement ont voilé l'Avenir;
Et ne consultez point tant de Devins célèbres
Pour chercher le moment qui doit nous désunir.
Livrez-vous au plaisir; tout le reste est frivole;
Et songez que, trop court pour de plus longs projets,
Tandis que nous parlons le Temps jaloux s'envole,
Et que ce Temps, hélas! est perdu pour jamais._
But wait--before I finish I must ask why you assure Clark of Trinity
that it is the _rooks_ who call "Maud, Maud, etc." Indeed it is the
_Thrush_, as I have heard a hundred times in a summer's evening, when
scared in the evergreens of a garden. Therefore:
Rooks in a classroom quarrel up in the tall trees caw'd;
But 'twas the thrush in the laurel, that kept crying, Maud, Maud,
Maud.
Keats he put very high indeed. "I have been again reading Lord Houghton's
_Life of Keats_" he wrote, "whose hastiest doggrel should show Browning,
Morris & Co., that they are not what the newspapers tell them they are."
"What a fuss the cockneys make about Shelley just now, surely not worth
Keats' little finger," he wrote on another occasion. And again, "Is Mr.
Rossetti a Great Poet like Browning and Morris? So the _Athenæum_ tells
me. Dear me, how thick Great Poets _do_ grow nowadays." And yet again, "I
can't read G. Eliot as I presume you can; I really conclude that the fault
lies in me, not in her; so with Goethe (except in his letters,
Table-Talk,[23] etc.), whom I try in vain to admire."
His real love was for Crabbe, the poet, not of "realism" but of reality.
Life's sternest painter and its best--
the poet of disillusionment. This love, which has been felt in different
generations by Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Bishop Gore, he could get few
of his friends to share with him. Tennyson himself was one of the few. "I
keep reading Crabbe from time to time," he writes to Tennyson; "nobody
else does unless it be another 'paltry Poet' whom I know. The edition only
sells at a shilling a volume--second-hand. I don't wonder at young people
and women (I mean no disparagement at all) not relishing even the good
parts: and certainly there is plenty of bad for all readers."
What he loved before all was "touches of nature," the humour, the pathos,
of ordinary life. He liked home-thrusts at human foibles and frailty, and
again the outwelling of native nobility, generosity, or love. Newman's
early Sermons, "Plain and Parochial" as they were, perhaps for this very
reason he much affected. "The best that were ever written in my judgment,"
he said. He remained an admirer of Newman, and speaks enthusiastically of
the _Apologia_ and its "sincerity." But he did not like the ritualism of
the Oxford movement. His traditions were Evangelical,--one reason perhaps
why he liked Newman. John Wesley was "one of his heroes," and he had much
sympathy with, and was at one period personally drawn by, evangelical and
revivalist Mission preaching.
He would have sympathized with Keble's lines teaching that his
fellow-creatures should not
Strive to wind themselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.
This was probably one of the reasons why he did not like "In Memoriam." He
said indeed that he thought it too artistic, too machine-made. He said
that he thought Tennyson became gradually altogether too artistic and lost
in spontaneity, vigour, and freshness. Yet he himself was a most laborious
artist, both in his verse and in his prose. _Omar_ is most carefully
elaborated, with correction on correction, and so are the best parts of
_Euphranor_. His reasons were really deeper, and went more against the
matter than the form. He did not like the early "Idylls of the King." "The
Holy Grail" he liked as he had liked the "Vision of Sin." But what moved
him to tears was the old-style "Northern Farmer," the "substantial,
rough-spun Nature he knew," and "the old brute, invested by the poet with
the solemn humour of Humanity like Shakespeare's _Shallow_." Yet even here
a "crotchet" cropped up, as appears from the following note:
WOODBRIDGE, _May 20th, 1877_.
The enclosed scrap from Notes and Queries reminded me (as probably the
writer has been reminded) of your Old Farmer, the only part of which
that goes against me is the "canter and canter away" of the last line.
I can scarce tell you (as usual with me) why I don't like Doctor Fell;
but you know I must be right.
By the by, my old Crabbe in the Parish Register (Burials), says
Bless me! I die--and not a warning giv'n--
With much to do on earth, and _all_ for Heaven:
No preparation for my soul's affairs,
No leave petitioned for the Barn's repairs, etc.
not very good; and (N.B.) I don't mean it suggested anything in
Shakespeare's Northern Farmer--for that may pair off with Shallow.
Again, when it appeared in 1865, he was greatly taken with the "Captain."
It was a return to the old personal mood and simple direct depiction of
character:
MARKETHILL, WOODBRIDGE,
_October 22nd, 1865_.
DEAR MRS. TENNYSON--Talking of ships again, I liked much _The Captain_
in the People's Alfred. Was the last stanza (which I like also) an
afterthought?--I think a really _sublime_ thing is the end of
Kingsley's "Westward Ho!"--(which I never could read through)--The
Chase of the Ships: the Hero's being struck blind at the moment of
revenge: then his being taken to _see_ his rival and crew at the
bottom of the sea. Kingsley is a distressing writer to me: but I must
think this (the inspiration of it) of a piece with Homer and the
Gods--which you won't at all.
He liked, too, "Gareth and Lynette," which again he thought more natural
and direct than some of the earlier Idylls. He liked, as might have been
expected, the "Ballads and other Poems." But what is most significant,
perhaps, among his likes and dislikes, is his love for "Audley Court,"
"one of my old favourites," he calls it. Why did FitzGerald like "Audley
Court"? It is not one of the poems which are generally best known and
most admired. Indeed, while it is in many ways beautiful and contains some
splendid things, such as the sonorous line
The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores,
it is just one of those poems which the severe critic of Tennyson picks
out for fault-finding and even for ridicule. It has what such critics call
the over-elaborate, the "drawing-room" manner. Like Milton's picture of
Eve's _déjeuner_, though with more humour and appropriateness, it employs
the grand and sumptuous style to describe trifles, such as the venison
pasty:
Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied.
But on a closer consideration it will be seen that it has just what "Old
Fitz" himself loved--the easy realism, the contentment with the things of
this world; above all, that flavour of
After-dinner talk
Across the walnuts and the wine
which he also found and loved in that other favourite, "The Miller's
Daughter," the harmless gossip about old friends
who was dead,
Who married, who was like to be, and how
The races went, and who would rent the hall.
This suited "Old Fitz's" temper absolutely. The humorous _pococurantism_,
for cynicism it hardly is, of the quatrains put into the mouth of the
Poet's friend, each ending "but let me live my life," breathes the very
spirit of his own indolent, kindly Epicureanism, and indeed the poem might
almost be taken as a record of a dialogue between the two friends in their
early days.
He loved, too, the "Lord of Burleigh," "The Vision of Sin," and "The Lady
of Shalott." The delicious idealism of these youthful pieces did not
displease him. They had for him a "champagne flavour." They were part of
his own youth. For a brief hour of that fast-fleeting day, the wine of
life had sparkled in his own glass, but then too soon turned flat and
flavourless.
For two or three things every lover of Tennyson must thank FitzGerald. He
it was who, about 1838, soon after their friendship began, got his friend,
Samuel Laurence, to paint the earliest portrait of the Poet, "the only one
of the old days and still the best of all to my thinking," as he wrote in
1871. He, too, preserved and gave to Tennyson the drawing by Thackeray of
the "Lord of Burleigh." When the Poet was rather dilatory in calling at
Spedding's house to claim this portrait, FitzGerald wrote: "Tell him I
don't think Browning would have served me so, and I mean to prefer his
poems for the future." He also rescued from the flames some of the pages
of the famous "Butcher's Book," the tall, ledger-like MS. volume, in which
many of the early poems he so much loved were written, and gave them to
the Library of Trinity College. About this he wrote:
MARKETHILL, WOODBRIDGE,
_December 4th, 1864_.
DEAR ALFRED--Now I should be almost ready to be "yours ever, etc." if
I didn't remember to ask you if you have any objection to my giving
two or three of the leaves of your old "Butcher's Book" (do you
remember?) to the Library at Trinity College? An admirer of your's
there told me they would be glad of some such thing--It was in 1842,
when you were printing the two good old volumes:--in Spedding's
rooms--and the "Butcher's Book," after its margins serving for
pipe-lights, went leaf by leaf into the fire: and I told you I would
keep two or three leaves of it as a remembrance. So I took a bit of my
old favourite "Audley Court": and a bit of another, I forget which:
for I can't lay my hands on them just now. But when I do, I shall give
them to Trinity College unless you are strongly opposed. I dare say,
however, you would give them the whole MS. of one of your later
poems: which probably they would value more.
Tennyson appreciated "Old Fitz's" fine qualities as a critic, but he
recognized their limitations, and in particular his "crotchets" and
prejudices. He was himself, as is now generally recognized, a consummate
critic, and withal a most kindly and catholic one. In my first
conversation with him he said that he used to think Goethe a good critic.
"He always discovered all the good he could in a man." To his own
contemporaries, especially towards Browning, for example, his attitude was
very different, as FitzGerald acknowledged, from FitzGerald's own. I did
not like, I remember, to ask him what he thought of Browning, but his son
encouraged me to do so. "You ask him," he said. "He'll tell you at once."
At last I did so. "A true genius, but wanting in art," he said. And on
another occasion he spoke rather more in detail to the same purpose.
A special friend of both Tennyson and FitzGerald was Thackeray. With him
FitzGerald had been intimate even earlier than with Tennyson. They were
friends at college, and had gone as young men together to Paris, Thackeray
ostensibly to study art. FitzGerald knew Paris of old. His father had a
home there when he was a child, and went there for a few months every year
for some years.
When he was nearing seventy FitzGerald wrote the following delightful
account of some of his recollections to Thackeray's daughter:
WOODBRIDGE, _May 18th, 1875_.
DEAR ANNIE THACKERAY--I suppose you love Paris as your Father did--as
I used to do till it was made so other than it was, in the days of
Louis XVIII. when I first lived in it. _Then_ it was all irregular and
picturesque; with shops, hotels, _cafés_, theatres, etc. intermixed
all along the Boulevards, all of different sorts and sizes.
Think of my remembering the _then_ Royal Family going in several
carriages to hunt in the Forest of St. Germain's--Louis XVIII. first,
with his _Gardes du Corps_, in blue and silver: then Monsieur
(afterwards Charles X.) with _his_ Guard in green and gold--French
horns blowing--"tra, tra, tra" (as Madame de Sévigné says), through
the lines of chestnut and limes--in flower. And then _Madame_ (of
Angoulême) standing up in her carriage, blear-eyed, dressed in white
with her waist at her neck--standing up in the carriage at a corner of
the wood to curtsey to the English assembled there--my mother among
them. This was in 1817. Now _you_ would have made a delightful
description of all this; you will say _I_ have done so, but that is
not so. And yet I saw, and see, it all.
Whenever you write again--(I don't wish you to write now) tell me what
you think of Irving and Salvini; of the former of whom I have very
different reports, Macready's Memoirs seem to me very _conscientious_
and _rather dull_; _toujours Megready_ (as one W. M. T. irreverently
called him). He seems to me to have had no humour--which I also
observed in his acting. He would have made a better scholar or divine,
I think: a very honourable, good man anywhere and anyhow.
With Thackeray himself he always maintained the same cordial relations as
he did with Tennyson. But his literary attitude shifted and varied in the
same way. Here, again, he preferred the early work which he had seen in
process of creation. In later years, when they met him at Woodbridge, he
said to "Alfred" and his son, "I hardly dare take down Thackeray's early
books, because they are so great. It's like waking the Thunder." He wrote
of Thackeray in 1849: "He is just the same. All the world 'admires _Vanity
Fair_,' and the author is courted by Dukes and Duchesses and wits of both
sexes. I like _Pendennis much_, and Alfred said he thought it was quite
delicious: it seemed to him so _mature_ he said." But a little later he
took alarm at the Dukes and Duchesses, and wrote to Frederick Tennyson: "I
am come to London, but I do not go to Operas or Plays, and have scarce
time (and it must be said, scarce inclination) to hunt up many friends--I
get shyer and shyer even of those I knew. Thackeray is in such a great
world that I am afraid of him; he gets tired of me and we are content to
regard each other at a distance. You, Alfred, Spedding, and Allen, are the
only men I ever care to see again.... As you know, I admire your poems,
the only poems by a living writer I do admire, except Alfred's."
He told Hallam Tennyson that he greatly admired the charming scene in
"Philip" where the young lady unexpectedly discovered her lover (Philip)
on the box of the diligence, and quieted the screaming children inside by
saying, "Hush! _he's_ there."
In particular, he was very severe on anything he called "cockney,"
speaking, that is, the language of the town, not of the country; in other
words, dealing with nature and human nature at second-hand. To this his
letters again and again return. Of "fine writing," as he called it, even
when it occurred in his own early work, he was unsparingly critical. Thus
of _Euphranor_ he wrote to Mrs. Kemble: "The Dialogue is a pretty thing in
some respects but disfigured by some confounded _smart_ writing in parts."
He thought this fault in particular, so he says in a letter to Frederick
Tennyson, "the loose screw in American literature," and deplored its
presence in Lowell, a writer whom otherwise he liked. "I honestly admire
his work in the main," he says, "and I think he is altogether the best
critic we have, something of what Ste. Beuve is in French." He thought
that Tennyson came to suffer from these defects in his later days, and
that the artist overpowered the man.
The latest of Tennyson's poems, of course, he did not live to see. He did
not see, for instance, "Crossing the Bar." What would he have thought of
it? Another old friend of Tennyson, also a fastidious critic, the Duke of
Argyll, in an unpublished letter of February 1, 1892, writing of this and
of the lines on the "Death of the Duke of Clarence," says: "Magnificent,
is all I can say of your lines in the _Nineteenth_. The two last things of
yours that I have seen, this and the 'Bar,' are both perfect in their
several ways, and such as no other man could have written. The 'Bar' is
the type of what I define Poetry to be, great thought in true imagery and
unusual expression. All the three are needed for the type thing. Much fine
poetry is to me only eloquence, which is quite another thing." With the
last sentence FitzGerald would certainly have agreed, for it is what in
other words he was himself constantly saying. But he seemed to require
something more than great thoughts and true images and choice diction.
Poignant and revealing touches, what he called in Crabbe "shrewd hits";
feeling, as well as, if not more than, thought--this was what he asked
for. All Browning's genius seemed to him _emphase_, cleverness, curiosity,
"cockneyism."