'Ingoldsby.' It seems to me as if the Beautiful being already appropriated
by former men of genius, those who are not inspired, can only try for a
Place among them by recourse to the Quaint, Grotesque, and Ugly in all the
Arts,--what I call the Gargoyle style." And again: "I always said he must
be a cockney, and now I find he is Camberwell-born--
It once was the Pastoral cockney,
It now is the cockney Profound."
The establishment of the Browning Society tried him specially. "Imagine a
man abetting all this," he writes. Tennyson had, through life, a high
opinion of FitzGerald's powers of criticism. They had often in their youth
discussed the classics of all time and all times together, and also, with
the poetic freedom of young men, their seniors, Shelley, and Byron, and
Wordsworth. It was FitzGerald who invented for the last the name by which
he went in their circle, of the "Daddy." They had fought for the ownership
of the Wordsworthian line, the "weakest blank verse in the language":
A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.
It really was FitzGerald's description, given in conversation, of the
gentleman who was going to marry his sister. When he died in 1862
FitzGerald, writing to Tennyson, reminded him of the line.
"This letter," he writes, "ought to be on a black-edged paper in a
black-edged cover: for I have just lost a brother-in-law--one of the
best of Men. If you ask, 'Who?' I reply, in what you once called the
weakest line ever enunciated:
A Mister Wilkinson, a Clergyman.
You can't remember this: in Old Charlotte Street, ages ago!"
In the valedictory verses Tennyson makes allusion to this critical habit:
And when I fancied that my friend
For this brief idyll would require
A less diffuse and opulent end,
And would defend his judgment well,
If I should deem it over nice,----
He himself was more catholic and generous. It was his generosity as well
as their admiration for him which gave him the place he held among his
brother poets and especially after he himself had won recognition among
the younger men.
His relation to Browning, Patmore, and P. J. Bailey, to Matthew Arnold and
Swinburne, to Watson and Kipling as to Dickens, Thackeray, and George
Eliot, are well known. There is one writer who ought to be added to the
list, who received some of his earliest encouragement from
Tennyson--George Meredith. A letter, hitherto unpublished, written in
January 1851, may illustrate this. He had just, in some trepidation, sent
Tennyson his first volume of poems, containing the now well-known "Love in
the Valley." As Meredith told me himself, Tennyson replied with an
exceedingly kind and "pretty" letter, saying that there was one poem in
the book he could have wished he had written, and inviting Meredith to
come to see him. The following is Meredith's answer:
SIR--When I tell you that it would have been my chief ambition in
publishing the little volume of poems you have received, to obtain
your praise, you may imagine what pride and pleasure your letter gave
me; though, indeed, I do not deserve so much as your generous
appreciation would bestow, and of this I am very conscious. I had but
counted twenty-three years when the book was published, which may
account for, and excuse perhaps many of the immaturities. When you say
you would like to know me, I can scarcely trust myself to express with
how much delight I would wait upon you--a privilege I have long
desired. As I suppose the number of poetic visits you receive are
fully as troublesome as the books, I will not venture to call on you
until you are able to make an appointment. My residence and address is
Weybridge, but I shall not return to Town from Southend before Friday
week. If in the meantime you will fix any day following that date, I
shall gladly avail myself of the honour of your invitation. My address
here is care of Mrs. Peacock, Southend, Essex. I have the honour to
be, most faithfully yours,
GEORGE MEREDITH.
Alfred Tennyson, Esq.
The complement to "Old Fitz" was Carlyle. He was the friend of both
FitzGerald and Tennyson. Gruff, grumbling, self-centred, satirical, at
times even rude and rough, as he was, both of them seemed to have got not
so much on his blind, as on his kind side from the first, and always to
have remained there. Carlyle's descriptions of Tennyson as a young man in
the early "forties" and of the pleasure he had in his company are well
known. "He seemed to take a fancy to me," Tennyson said himself one day
while we talked about him at Farringford. They foregathered a good deal
at this period, sat and smoked silently, walked and talked together, both
by day and night. FitzGerald told Hallam Tennyson, years after, during the
visit to Woodbridge, that Carlyle was much concerned at this period about
his father's poverty, and said to him, "Alfred must have a pension." The
story of the way in which he spurred on "Dicky" Milnes to secure the
pension is now classical. What his special effect, if he had any, on
Tennyson was, it might be difficult to estimate or analyse.
The younger generation to-day does not remember the period of Carlyle's
immense influence. It lasted just into the youth of my contemporaries and
myself, or perhaps a little longer, and then began to wane and die away.
He certainly was a "radio-active" force in the days and with the men of
Tennyson's youth,--Maurice, and Sterling, and "Dicky" Milnes, as he was a
little later with Ruskin and Kingsley. FitzGerald, with his detachment and
his fearless sincerity, estimated him as fairly as any one. "Do you see
Carlyle's _Latter-Day Pamphlets_?" he wrote. "They make the world laugh,
and his friends rather sorry for him. But that is because people will
still look for practical measures from him. One must be content with him
as a great satirist who can make us feel when we are wrong, though he
cannot set us right. There is a bottom of truth in Carlyle's wildest
rhapsodies."
He wrote to Frederick Tennyson in 1850: "When I spoke of the 'Latter-Day
Prophet' I conclude you have read or heard of Carlyle's Pamphlets. People
are tired of them and of him; he only foams, snaps, and howls and no
progress people say. This is about true, and yet there is vital good in
all he has written." Again, in 1854, he says, "Carlyle I did not go to
see, for I have really nothing to tell him, and I am tired of hearing him
growl, tho' I admire him as much as ever." "I wonder if he ever thinks how
much sound and fury he has vented," he writes on another occasion.
But the posthumous publication of Carlyle's Letters, as he wrote about a
fortnight before his own death, "raised him in FitzGerald's esteem"; and
his last effort was to go to Chelsea to see his statue, and the old house
hard by which he had not seen for five-and-twenty years, to find it, alas,
"deserted, neglected, and 'To let!'"
Carlyle was indeed much what "Old Fitz" describes. He was a powerful
solvent of his age. He destroyed many shams, "Hebrew rags," "old clothes,"
as he called them. Both by his own example and his fiery energy he
inculcated the "Gospel of Work." He was not a modern realist, but a man
who dealt in realities, who perceived that virtue and beauty and faith are
as real as vice and ugliness and unfaith, nay, perhaps more real; but that
certainly neither are shams, neither God nor the Devil, though of shams,
of false gods and false devils, there are many. His appreciation of poetry
was, as is well known, but scant and intermittent. He used to banter
Tennyson and call him "a Life-Guardsman spoiled by making poetry," but he
became converted even to his poems, though, as he said, this was
surprising to himself. He "felt the pulse of a real man's heart" in the
1842 volumes. "Ulysses" was a special favourite. He quoted again and again
the lines:
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.
"These lines do not make me weep," he said, "but there is in me what would
fill whole Lachrymatories as I read." He, fortunately, also "took a fancy"
to Mrs. Tennyson when he met her as a bride at Tent Lodge, Coniston,
partly because, in answer to one of his wild grumbles, she said, "That is
not sane, Mr. Carlyle." An unpublished letter from Carlyle of the date
October 1850, describes an admirer of Tennyson's poems, an ill-starred but
brave man, a skilful physician, a friend of Dr. John Carlyle at
Leamington, who, after losing the greater part of his face by _caries_ of
the bone, had at last been cured, though awfully disfigured. "He fled to
Keswick," writes Carlyle, "and there he now resides, not idle still, nor
forsaken of friends, or hope, or domestic joy--a monument of human
courtesy, and really a worthy and rather interesting man. Such is your
admirer and mine. Heaven be good to him and us."
FitzGerald, in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, quotes with approval a
criticism of Lowell's that Carlyle "was a poet in all but rhythm"; and it
would not be difficult to find "parallel passages" between Tennyson and
Carlyle, between _Sartor Resartus_ and "In Memoriam." The _Life of
Sterling_, too, should be read by any student anxious to "reconstitute the
atmosphere" in which that poem grew up, and which, to a certain extent, it
still breathes. But "parallel passages" are misleading. Suffice it to say
that both went through the storm and stress of a doubting age, both took
their stand on the solid rock of God and of real, healthy human
nature,--both emerged in the "Eternal Yea."
Froude, in his history of Carlyle's Life in London, has a most interesting
autobiographic passage about Carlyle's position and influence in 1843, the
time of the publication of _Past and Present_, which brings this out with
special force. He says:
In this condition the best and bravest of my own contemporaries
determined to have done with insincerity, to find ground under their
feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and
what we could honestly regard as true and believe that and live by it.
Tennyson became the voice of this feeling in poetry, Carlyle in what
was called prose, though prose it was not, but something by itself
with a form and melody of its own.
Tennyson's Poems, the group of Poems which closed with "In Memoriam,"
became to many of us what the "Christian Year" was to orthodox
Churchmen. We read them, and they became part of our minds, the
expression in exquisite language of the feelings which were working in
ourselves. Carlyle stood beside him as a prophet and teacher; and to
the young, the generous, to every one who took life seriously, who
wished to make an honourable use of it and could not be content with
sitting down and making money, his words were like the morning
_reveille_.
Others may come at last to the sad conclusion that nothing can be
known about the world, that the external powers, whatever they may be,
are indifferent to human action or human welfare. To such an opinion
some men, and those not the worst, may be driven after weary
observation of life. But the young will never believe it; or if they
do they have been young only in name.
If the first paragraphs aptly "place" Tennyson and Carlyle, the last,
though not intentionally, exactly suits their friend, the translator of
the _Rubáiyát_. FitzGerald remained, as his friend the Master of Trinity
College (W. H. Thompson) said, in "Doubting Castle." Tennyson was the most
hopeful, as well as the most balanced and sane, and therefore the most
helpful of the three.
Toward the end of his life, Carlyle, in the Inaugural Address given by him
as Rector of Edinburgh University, in which he summed up so many of the
convictions of a lifetime, put forward the following description of the
completely healthy human spirit. "A man all lucid and in equilibrium. His
intellect a clear mirror, geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to
all objects and impressions made on it, and imaging all things in their
correct proportions, not twisted up into convex or concave and distorting
everything so that he cannot see the truth of the matter without endless
groping and manipulation--healthy, clear and free, and discerning all
round about him." He put this picture before young men as the ideal to be
aimed at by the intellectual student, and in particular by the man of
letters. "But," he said, "we can never never attain that at all." Perhaps
not altogether. Perhaps even he who invented the phrase for the poet's
duty of "holding the mirror up to Nature," did not wholly attain to it.
But, according to his measure, it is no bad description of Alfred
Tennyson, with the "universality of his mind," the simplicity of his good
sense, the childlike sincerity of his spirit. This quality it was that
both Carlyle and FitzGerald found and liked in him.
It has been said that Tennyson and FitzGerald read the same books. One of
the best instances of this is to be found in a long letter of FitzGerald's
about posthumous fame and literary immortality. It was written to Cowell
in 1847, and is given by Dr. Aldis Wright in his first collection. After
speaking of Homer and the _Iliad_, FitzGerald writes:
Yet as I often think it is not the poetical imagination, but bare
Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the
Iliad; the history of the world, the great infinitudes of Space and
Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes
me. And when we think that Man must go on in the same plodding way,
one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or
turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of
discovery will distance all his imaginations and dissolve the language
in which they are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now after two
thousand years: a space that seems long to us whose lives are so
brief; but a moment, the twinkling of an eye, if compared (not to
Eternity alone), but to the ages which it is now known the world must
have existed, and (unless for some external violence) must continue to
exist.
Lyell in his book about America, says that the Falls of Niagara, if
(as seems certain) they have worked their way back southwards for
seven miles, must have taken over 35,000 years to do so at the rate of
something over a foot a year! Sometimes they fall back on a stratum
that crumbles away from behind them more easily: but then again they
have to roll over rock that yields to them scarce more perceptibly
than the anvil to the serpent. And these very soft strata, which the
Cataract now erodes, contain evidences of a race of animals, and of
the action of seas washing over them, long before Niagara came to have
a distinct current; and the rocks were compounded ages and ages before
those strata! So that, as Lyell says, the geologist, looking at
Niagara forgets even the roar of its waters in the contemplation of
the awful processes of time that it suggests. It is not only that the
vision of Time must wither the Poet's hope of immortality, but it is
in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.
This train of thought was evidently often present to FitzGerald's mind. It
oppressed him. It makes itself felt in the _Rubáiyát_. It was one of the
many great ideas he imported into, or educed from, the old Persian
Astronomer.
And fear not lest existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has poured
Millions of Bubbles like us and will pour
When you and I behind the Veil are past:
Oh but the long long while the world shall last,
Which of our coming and departure heeds
As the Sev'n Seas should heed a pebble-cast.
It was even more constantly present to the mind of Tennyson. Astronomy and
Geology had been among his favourite studies from his early youth, and
remained so all his life. When I was walking with him toward the Needles
and looking at the magnificent chalk cliff below the downs, and spoke
about his felicitous epithet for it--"the milky steep," he said, "The most
wonderful thing about that cliff is to think it was all once alive." The
allusions to it in his poems are innumerable:
There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
He was always "hearing the roll of the ages." He, too, had read his Lyell,
and the contemplation of geological time suggested to him exactly the same
reflections which FitzGerald draws out. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that
he himself may have imparted them to FitzGerald. For he has embodied just
these thoughts in that noble late poem "Parnassus," with a resemblance
which is startling. But while the parallel between "Parnassus" and
FitzGerald's letter is extraordinarily close up to a certain point, the
contrast, when it is reached, is even more striking, and is the
fundamental contrast between the two men and their creeds:
What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain,
Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain?
On those two known peaks they stand, ever spreading and heightening;
Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning!
Look, in their deep double shadow the crown'd ones all disappearing!
Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing!
Sounding for ever and ever? pass on! the sight confuses--
These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!
So far Tennyson agrees with _Omar_:
Ah make the most of what we yet may spend
Before we too into the dust descend;
Dust into dust and under dust to lie,
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and sans end!
But then comes the divergence, conveyed with the exquisitely sympathetic
change of rhythm:
If the lips were touch'd with fire from off a pure Pierian altar,
Tho' their music here be mortal, need the singer greatly care?
Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter;
Let the golden Iliad vanish, Homer here is Homer there.
The beautiful lines which form the Envoy to "Tiresias," already alluded
to, never reached their address. I remember well, when we spoke of
FitzGerald, the sadness with which Tennyson said to me, "He never saw
them. He died before they were sent him." After his death Tennyson added
the Epilogue on the same note. It is touching to see that in his closing
lines to his old friend he had hinted with tender delicacy at the same
creed to which he always clung:
Gone into darkness, that full light
Of friendship! past, in sleep, away
By night, into the deeper night!
The deeper night? A clearer day
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth--
If night, what barren toil to be!
What life, so maim'd by night, were worth
Our living out? Not mine to me
Remembering all the golden hours
Now silent, and so many dead
And him the last; and laying flowers,
This wreath, above his honour'd head,
And praying that, when I from hence
Shall fade with him into the unknown,
My close of earth's experience
May prove as peaceful as his own.
Like many rough and overbearing men Carlyle liked those who stood up to
him and gave him back, in his own phrase, "shake for shake." FitzGerald
was one of these. He made his better acquaintance by contradicting and
correcting him about the battlefield and the buried warriors of Naseby
Fight. Carlyle took it all in excellent part, and they became close
friends. Carlyle went to visit him and invited the many letters which
FitzGerald wrote. In his later years he sent one of these letters to C. E.
Norton as a "slight emblem and memorial of the peaceable, affectionate,
ultra-modest man and his innocent _far niente_ life"; "and," he adds, "the
connection (were there nothing more) of Omar, the Mahometan Blackguard,
and Oliver Cromwell, the English Puritan."
But "Old Fitz" could criticize and sum up Carlyle equally effectively. He
most happily pointed out his inconsistency in praising the "Hebrew rags"
of the old Evangelical beliefs when seen in Cromwell and his generals, and
not being willing to let them still serve for humble folk in his own day.
His tone here is singularly like that of Tennyson's well-known lines,
beginning:
Leave thou thy sister when she prays.
"We may be well content," FitzGerald writes, "even to suffer some
absurdities in the Form if the Spirit does well on the whole." He would
probably have agreed with much of Tennyson's "Akbar's Dream," which he did
not live to read. For the tenets of "Omar," "The Mahometan Blackguard,"
must not be taken as representing the whole of FitzGerald's philosophy,
any more than his eccentricities and negligent habits must be taken as a
complete expression of his life.
Too exclusive attention has been paid to both. Dr. Aldis Wright, one of
the few surviving friends who knew him really well, speaks justly of "the
exaggerated stories of his slovenliness and his idleness," and "of the way
in which he has been made responsible for all the oddities of his family."
"Every tale," he says, "that may be true of some of his kin, is fathered
upon him."
And FitzGerald's own Preface to his translation of _Omar_ shows what his
real moral and religious attitude toward the _Rubáiyát_ was. He felt
bound, so far as the spirit, if not the letter, went, to present it
faithfully, if not literally; but he speaks very gravely of it. "The
quatrains here selected," he writes in the Preface, "are strung into
something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the
'Drink and make merry' which (genuine or not), recurs over frequently in
the original. Either way, the result is sad enough, saddest perhaps when
most ostentatiously merry, more apt to move sorrow than Anger toward the
old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavouring to unshackle his steps from
Destiny and to catch some authentic Glimpse of TO-MORROW, fell back upon
TO-DAY (which has outlived so many To-morrows!) as the only ground he got
to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet."
The truth is, Old Fitz's foibles, and indeed his faults, were only too
patent to others and to himself. But if _noscitur a sociis_ holds good,
Carlyle and Tennyson and Thackeray, Spedding, Thompson, the Cowells, and
Mrs. Kemble, the friends of his whole lifetime, Lowell and C. E. Norton,
those of his later years, may be permitted to outweigh his at times too
tolerant cultivation and indulgence of his burly Vikings. Tennyson's
relation to him was summed up in his letter to Sir Frederick Pollock which
Dr. Aldis Wright quotes, but which may fitly here be quoted again: "I had
no truer friend; he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never
known one of so fine and delicate a wit."
These words, with Tennyson's poetic picture already quoted, with Carlyle's
epithets, "innocent, _far niente_, ultra-modest," with his own writings
taken as a whole and not _Omar_ alone, especially his Letters, may be left
to speak for him in life and in death,--these and the epitaph which he
asked to have placed upon his gravestone:
"It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves."
SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON'S TALK FROM 1835 TO 1853
[Many more were in a Notebook, which I have now lost.--E. F. G.]
By EDWARD FITZGERALD
(Given to Hallam Lord Tennyson[24])
1835
(Resting on our oars one calm day on Windermere, whither we had gone for a
week from dear Spedding's Mirehouse at the end of May 1835,--resting on
our oars, and looking into the lake quite unruffled and clear, he quoted
from the lines he had lately read us from the MS. of "Morte d'Arthur"
about the lonely lady of the Lake and Excalibur.)
Nine days she wrought it, sitting all alone
Upon the hidden bases of the Hills.
"Not bad that, Fitz, is it?"
(One summer day looking from Richmond Star and Garter.)
"I love those woods that go triumphing down to the river."
"Somehow water is the element which I love best of all the four." (He was
passionately fond of the sea and of babbling brooks.--ED.)
"Some one says that nothing strikes one more on returning from the
Continent than the look of our English country towns. Houses not so big,
nor such rows of them as abroad; but each house, little or big, distinct
from one another, each man's castle, built according to his own means and
fancy, and so indicating the Englishman's individual humour.
"I have been two days abroad--no further than Boulogne this time, but I am
struck as always on returning from France with the look of good sense in
the London people."
(Standing before a Madonna, by Murillo, at the Dulwich Gallery--her eyes
fixed on you.)