Edward FitzGerald

“ What a touch when Peggotty—the man—at last finds the lost Girl, and—throws a handkerchief over her face when he takes her to his arms—never to leave her! I maintain it—a little Shakespeare—a Cockney Shakespeare, if you will: but as distinct, if not so great, a piece of pure Genius as was born in Stratford. Oh, I am quite sure of that, had I to choose but one of them, I would choose Dickens’ hundred delightful Caricatures rather than Thackeray’s half-dozen terrible Photographs. ”

“ On one side it has a garden, then the meadows through which winds the Ouse: on the other, the public road, with its coaches hurrying on to London, its market people halting to drink, its farmers, horsemen, and foot travellers. So, as one’s humour is, one can have whichever phase of life one pleases: quietude or bustle; solitude or the busy hum of men: one can sit in the principal room with a tankard and a pipe and see both these phases at once through the windows that open upon either. ”

“ I had thought Beauty was the main object of the Arts: but these people, not having Genius, I suppose, to create any new forms of that, have recourse to the Ugly, and find their Worshippers in plenty. In Poetry, Music, and Painting, it seems to me the same. And people think all this finer than Mozart, Raffaelle, and Tennyson—as he was—but he never ceases to be noble and pure. ”

“ Omar, more desperate, or more careless of any so complicated System as resulted in nothing but hopeless Necessity, flung his own Genius and Learning with a bitter or humorous jest into the general Ruin which their insufficient glimpses only served to reveal; and, pretending sensual pleasure, as the serious purpose of Life, only diverted himself with speculative problems of Deity, Destiny, Matter and Spirit, Good and Evil, and other such questions, easier to start than to run down, and the pursuit of which becomes a very weary sport at last! ”

“ You may imagine that we are no better off in the East of England. How is it in London, and with yourself in Queen Anne’s Mansions? I fancy that you walk up and down that ante-room of yours for a regular time, as I force myself to do on a Landing-place in this house when I cannot get out upon what I call my Quarter-deck: a walk along a hedge by the upper part of a field which ‘dominates’ (as the phrase now goes) over my House and Garden. But I have for the last Fortnight had Lumbago, which makes it much easier to sit down than to get up again. ”

“ I believe that I, as men usually do, grow more callous and indifferent daily: but I am sure I would as soon travel to see your face, and my dear old Alfred’s, as any one’s. But beside my inactivity, I have a sort of horror of plunging into London; which, except for a shilling concert, and a peep at the pictures, is desperate to me. This is my fault, not London’s: I know it is a lassitude and weakness of soul that no more loves the ceaseless collision of Beaux Esprits, than my obese ill-jointed carcase loves bundling about in coaches and steamers. ”

“ One thinks that no one who had well read him and Don Quixote would ever write with a strain again, as is the curse of nearly all modern Literature. I know that ‘Easy Writing is d---d hard Reading.’ Of course the Man must be a Man of Genius to take his Ease: but, if he be, let him take it. I suppose that such as Dante, and Milton, and my Daddy, took it far from easy: well, they dwell apart in the Empyrean; but for Human Delight, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Boccaccio, and Scott! ”

“ A steady portrait especially invites one to do so: the quietude of it ironically tempts one to outrage it: one feels it would close again over the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened. That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude: no wonder his view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. ”

“ I doubt that Donne has given you too flattering an account of my house, and me: you know he is pleased with every one and everything: I know it also, and therefore no longer dissuade him from spending his time and money in a flying Visit here in the course of his Visits to other East Anglian friends and Kinsmen. But I feel a little all the while as if I were taking all, and giving nothing in return: I mean, about Books, People, etc., with which a dozen years discontinuance of Society, and, latterly, incompetent Eyes, have left me in the lurch. ”

“ The Vizier was generous and kept his word. Hasan demanded a place in the government, which the Sultan granted at the Vizier's request; but discontented with a gradual rise, he plunged into the maze of intrigue of an oriental court, and, failing in a base attempt to supplant his benefactor, he was disgraced and fell. After many mishaps and wanderings, Hasan became the head of the Persian sect of the Ismailians,--a party of fanatics who had long murmured in obscurity, but rose to an evil eminence under the guidance of his strong and evil will. ”

“ I have sent you a better Book than any I can send you of my own: or of any one else’s in the way of Verse, I think: the Sonnets of Alfred Tennyson’s Brother Charles. Two thirds of them I do not care for: but there is scarce one without some fine thought or expression: some of them quite beautiful to me: all pure, true, and original. I think you in America may like these leaves from the Life of a quiet Lincolnshire Parson. ”

“ If however he should by any misfortune of mine arrive before I do, know that he is Samuel Laurence, a portrait painter of real genius, of whom during the last year I have seen a great deal and boldly pronounce him to be worthy of all good men’s love. He is one of the men of whom you feel certain that they will never tire you, and never do anything which you will wish they had not done. ”

“ What inspires me now is, that, about the time you were writing to me about Burns and Béranger, I was thinking of them ‘which was the Greater Genius?’—I can’t say; but, with all my Admiration for about a Score of the Frenchman’s almost perfect Songs, I would give all of them up for a Score of Burns’ Couplets, Stanzas, or single Lines scattered among those quite imperfect Lyrics of his. Béranger, no doubt, was The Artist; which still is not the highest Genius—witness Shakespeare, Dante, Æschylus, Calderon, to the contrary. Burns assuredly had more Passion than the Frenchman ”

“ Old Spedding supplies a beautiful Prose Overture to this delightful Volume: never was Critic more one with his Subject—or, Object, is it? Frederick Tennyson, my old friend, ought to have done something to live along with his Brothers: all who will live, I believe, of their Generation: and he perhaps would, if he could, have confined himself to limits not quite so narrow as the Sonnet. But he is a Poet, and cannot be harnessed.
I have still a few flowers surviving in my Garden; and I certainly never remember the foliage of trees so little changed in October’s third week. ”

“ Sophocles is doubtless the better artist, the more complete; but are we to expect anything but glimpses and ruins of the divinest? Sophocles is a pure Greek temple; but Æschylus is a rugged mountain, lashed by seas, and riven by thunderbolts: and which is the most wonderful, and appalling? Or if one will have Æschylus too a work of man, I say he is like a Gothic Cathedral, which the Germans say did arise from the genius of man aspiring up to the immeasurable, and reaching after the infinite in complexity and gloom, according as Christianity elevated and widened men’s minds. ”

“ So I have read through this Book of Munro’s, only 240 pages, not commenting on the best of the Poems, but on those which most needed Elucidation; which are many of them the least interesting, and even most disagreeable. Like your Olympia, I don’t understand much: but what I do understand is so good that I feel sure the rest (and that is the larger and perhaps more important part) is as good for those it is intended for.
Just as I shut up Catullus, I opened Keats’ Love Letters just published; and really felt no shock of change between the one Poet and the other. ”

“ Here is a Day for entering on seventy-four! But I do think, notwithstanding, that I am not much the better for it. The Cold I had before Christmas, returns, or lurks about me: and I cannot resolve on my usual out-of-door liberty. Enough of that. I suppose that I shall have some Company at Easter; my poor London Clerk, if he can find no more amusing place to go to for his short Holyday; probably Aldis Wright, who always comes into these parts at these Seasons—his ‘Nazione’ being Beccles. ”

“ To Bernard Barton.
Geldestone, 22 August 1844.
My dear Barton,
You will think I have forgot you. I spent four pleasant days with Donne: who looks pale and thin, and in whose face the grey is creeping up from those once flourishing whiskers to the skull. It is doing so with me. We are neither of us in what may be called the first dawn of boyhood. Donne maintains his shape better than I do, but sorrow I doubt has done that: and so we see why the house of mourning is better than the stalled ox. For it is a grievous thing to grow poddy: the age of Chivalry is gone then. ”

“ Like yourself I have gone through Spedding, seven long long volumes, not skipping except where I had got the sense with me, and generally reading all of Bacon’s own that was there: I confess to you I found it a most creditable and even surprising Book, offering the most perfect and complete image both of Bacon and of Spedding, and distinguished as the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have ever met with in this generation. Bacon is washed clean down to the natural skin; and truly he is not nor ever was unlovely to me; a man of no culpability to speak of ”

“ Do you know the music? It is of Handel’s best: and as classical as any man who wore a full-bottomed wig could write. I think Handel never gets out of his wig: that is, out of his age: his Hallelujah chorus is a chorus not of angels, but of well-fed earthly choristers, ranged tier above tier in a Gothic cathedral, with princes for audience, and their military trumpets flourishing over the full volume of the organ. Handel’s gods are like Homer’s, and his sublime never reaches beyond the region of the clouds. ”

“ This time ten years I was lodging at Oxford, reading Persian with you. I doubt I shall never do so again; I am too lazy to turn Dictionaries over now; and indeed had some while ceased to expect much to turn up from them. You are quite right, as a Scholar, to work out the Mine; but you admit that nothing is likely to come out of such Value as from the Greek, Latin, and English, which we have ready to our hands. Did I tell you how pleased I had been with Sophocles and Æschylus in my Boat this Summer? ”

“ Of his brothers and sisters I retain no knowledge, but with him I still keep up an affectionate and to me most valuable and interesting correspondence. He was distinguished from the rest of his family, and indeed from most people, by the possession of very rare intellectual and artistic gifts. A poet, a painter, a musician, an admirable scholar and writer, if he had not shunned notoriety as sedulously as most people seek it, he would have achieved a foremost place among the eminent men of his day, and left a name second to that of very few of his contemporaries. ”

“ But one finds few in London serious men: I mean serious even in fun: with a true purpose and character whatsoever it may be. London melts away all individuality into a common lump of cleverness. I am amazed at the humour and worth and noble feeling in the country, however much railroads have mixed us up with metropolitan civilization. I can still find the heart of England beating healthily down here, though no one will believe it. ”

“ I am persuaded that, to keep Life in the Work (as Drama must) the Translator (however inferior to his Original) must re-cast that original into his own Likeness, more or less: the less like his original, so much the worse: but still, the live Dog better than the dead Lion; in Drama, I say. As to Epic, is not Cary still the best Dante? Cowper and Pope were both Men of Genius, out of my Sphere; but whose Homer still holds its own? ”

“ My dear good Allen,
Let me hear from you, if even but a line, before you leave London on your summer excursion, whithersoever that is to be. I conclude you go somewhere; to Hampshire, or to Tenby. . . .
I have nothing to tell you of myself. Here I exist, and read scraps of books, garden a little, and am on good terms with my neighbours. The Times paper is stirring up our farming society to the root, and some good will come of it, I dare say, and some ill. Do you know of any good books on Education? not for the poor or Charity schools, but on modern Gentlemen’s grammar schools, etc. ”

“ Ten years before, Nov. 2, 1860, FitzGerald wrote to his old friend, the late Mr. W. E. Crowfoot of Beccles: ‘I have been reading with interest some French Memoirs towards the end of the last century: when the French were a cheerful, ingenious, witty, trifling people; they had not yet tasted of the Blood of the Revolution, which really seems to me to have altered their character. The modern French Novels exhibit Vengeance as a moving Virtue: even toward one another: can we suppose they think less well of it towards us? In this respect they are really the most barbarous People of Europe. ”

“ There is as genuine a feeling of Nature in one of Nursey’s sketches as in the Rubenses and Claudes here: and if that is evident, and serves to cherish and rekindle one’s own sympathy with the world about one, the great end is accomplished. I do not know very much of Salvator: is he not rather a melodramatic painter? No doubt, very fine in his way. But Claude and the two Poussins are the great ideal painters of Landscape. Nature looks more stedfast in them than in other painters: all is wrought up into a quietude and harmony that seem eternal. ”

“ I hope to get out of London to my poor old Boulge next week. I have seen all my friends so as to satisfy them that I am a duller country fellow than I was, and so we shall part without heart-breaking on either side. It is partly one’s fault not to be up to the London mark: but as there is a million of persons in the land fully up to it, one has the less call to repent in that respect. I confess that Mr. Reynolds is a better sight to me than old rouged Lady Morgan and all such. ”

“ We shall lose a perfect Lady, in the complete sense of the word, when she dies.
I have been doing very little since I have been here: having accomplished only a few Idylls of Theocritus, which harmonize with this opening of the fine weather. Is all this poor occupation for a man who has a soul to account for? You think so certainly. My dear Allen, you, with your accustomed humility, asked me if I did not think you changed when I was last in London: never did I see man less so: indeed you stand on too sure a footing to change, I am persuaded. ”

“ Well, say as you will, there is not, and never was, such a country as Old England—never were there such a Gentry as the English. They will be the distinguishing mark and glory of England in History, as the Arts were of Greece, and War of Rome. I am sure no travel would carry me to any land so beautiful, as the good sense, justice, and liberality of my good countrymen make this. ”

“ To let Chaos say out its say, then, and one’s Evil Genius give one the very worst language he has, for a while. It is still to last for a week or more. To day, for the first time, I ride back to Chelsea, but mean to return hither on Monday. There is a great circle of yellow light all the way from Shooter’s Hill to Primrose Hill, spread round my horizon every night, I see it while smoking my pipe before bed (so bright, last night, it cast a visible shadow of me against the white window-shutters) ; and this is all I have to do with London and its gases for a fortnight or more. ”

“ E. FitzGerald.
[London, 8 June, 1838.]
Dear Sir,
I have just come home after accompanying my Father and Lusia to their starting place in the City: they are off for Suffolk for some days. I should have written to you by them: but I only just now found your letter on the mantelpiece: there it has lain some days during which I have been ruralising in Bedfordshire. Delicious has it been there: such weather, such meadows, to enjoy: and the Ouse still wandering along at his ease through pretty villages and vales of his own beautifying. ”

“ I believe I love poetry almost as much as ever: but then I have been suffered to doze all these years in the enjoyment of old childish habits and sympathies, without being called on to more active and serious duties of life. I have not put away childish things, though a man. But, at the same time, this visionary inactivity is better than the mischievous activity of so many I see about me; not better than the useful and virtuous activity of a few others: John Allen among the number.
To F. Tennyson.
Portland Coffee House, London. ”

“ T. Cooke is in his place with his marshal’s baton in his hand: he lifts it up: and off they set with old Handel’s noble overture. As it is playing, the red velvet curtain (which Macready has substituted, not wisely, for the old green one) draws apart: and you see a rich drop scene, all festooned and arabesqued with River Gods, Nymphs, and their emblems; and in the centre a delightful, large, good copy of Poussin’s great landscape (of which I used to have a print in my rooms) where the Cyclops is seen seated on a mountain, looking over the sea-shore. ”

“ I have refused to be Godfather to all who have ever asked me; but I declare it will give me sincere pleasure to officiate for your Child. I got your photograph at last: it is a beastly thing: not a bit like: why did you not send your Poems, which are like you; and reflect your dear old face well? As you know I admire your poems, the only poems by a living writer I do admire, except Alfred’s, you should not hesitate. I can have no doubt whatever they ought to be published in England: I believe Moxon would publish them: and I believe you would make some money by them. ”

“ I pretend to no Genius, but to Taste: which, according to my aphorism, is the feminine of Genius. . . .
. . . Please to answer me directly. I constantly think of you: and, as I have often sincerely told you, with a kind of love which I feel towards but two or three friends. Are you coming to England? How goes on Grimsby! Doesn’t the state of Europe sicken you? Above all, let me have any poems you print: you are now the only man I expect verse from; such gloomy grand stuff as you write. Thackeray, to be sure, can write good ballads, half serious. ”

“ You tell my Father you mean to write a Poem about my invisibility—and somehow it seems strange to myself that I have been so long absent from Woodbridge. It was a toss up (as boys say—and perhaps Gods) whether I should go now:—the toss has decided I should not. On the contrary I am going to see Donne at Mattishall: a visit, which having put off a fortnight ago, I am now determined to pay. But if I do not see you before I go to London, I shall assuredly be down again by the latter part of February: when toasted cheese and ale shall again unite our souls. ”

“ Here is a glorious sunshiny day: all the morning I read about Nero in Tacitus lying at full length on a bench in the garden: a nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun manfully not far off. A funny mixture all this: Nero, and the delicacy of Spring: all very human however. Then at half past one lunch on Cambridge cream cheese: then a ride over hill and dale: then spudding up some weeds from the grass: and then coming in, I sit down to write to you, my sister winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the most delightful little girl in the world chattering incessantly. ”

“ Spedding is especially mad about her, I understand: and, after that, is it not best for weaker vessels to keep out of her way? Night after night is that bald head seen in one particular position in the Opera house, in a stall; the miserable man has forgot Bacon and philosophy, and goes after strange women. There is no doubt this lady is a wonderful singer; but I will not go into hot crowds till another Pasta comes; I have heard no one since her worth being crushed for. And to perform in one’s head one of Handel’s choruses is better than most of the Exeter Hall performances. ”

“ You like to hear of men and manners. Have I not been to London for a whole fortnight, seen Alfred, Spedding, all the lawyers and all the painters, gone to Panoramas of Naples by Volcano-light (Vesuvius in a blaze illuminating the whole bay, which Morton says is not a bit better than Plymouth Sound, if you could put a furnace in the belly of Mount Edgecumbe) —gone to see the Antigone of Messrs. Sophocles and Mendelssohn at Covent Garden—gone to see the Infant Thalia—now as little of an Infant as a Thalia—at the Adelaide Gallery. ”

“ Oh this wonderful wonderful world, and we who stand in the middle of it are all in a maze, except poor Matthews of Bedford, who fixes his eyes upon a wooden Cross and has no misgiving whatsoever. When I was at his chapel on Good Friday, he called at the end of his grand sermon on some of the people to say merely this, that they believed Christ had redeemed them: and first one got up and in sobs declared she believed it: and then another, and then another—I was quite overset:—all poor people: how much richer than all who fill the London Churches. ”

“ What can ‘In Memoriam’ do but make us all sentimental? . . .
My dear Frederic, I hope to see you one day: I really do look forward one day to go and see you in Italy, as well as to see you here in England. I know no one whom it would give me more pleasure to think of as one who might perhaps be near me as we both go down the hill together, whether in Italy or England. You, Spedding, Thackeray, and only one or two more. The rest have come like shadows and so departed.
To G. Crabbe. ”

“ Rome certainly is nearer England than Naples: so perhaps you are coming back. Bring Morton back with you. I will then go to London and we will smoke together and be as merry as sandboys. We will all sit under the calm shadow of Spedding’s forehead. People talk of a war with America. Poor dear old England! she makes a gallant shew in her old age. ”

“ Dear Cowell,
The weather is so ungenial, and likely to be so, that I put off my journey to Ipswich till next week. I do not dislike the weather for my part: but one is best at home in such: and as I am to stay two days with the Hockleys, I would fain have tolerably fair days, and fair ways, for it: that one may get about and so on. One does not mind being cooped up in one’s own room all day. I think of going on Monday. Shall you be at home next week?
I have read Longus and like him much. Is it the light easy Greek that pleases one? ”

“ I also am an Arcadian: have been to Exeter—the coast of Devonshire—the Bristol Channel—and to visit a Parson in Dorsetshire. He wore cap and gown when I did at Cambridge—together did we roam the fields about Granchester, discuss all things, thought ourselves fine fellows, and that one day we should make a noise in the world. He is now a poor Rector in one of the most out-of-the-way villages in England—has five children—fats and kills his pig—smokes his pipe—loves his home and cares not ever to be seen or heard of out of it. ”

“ I wonder whether old Seneca was indeed such a humbug as people now say he was: he is really a fine writer. About three hundred years ago, or less, our divines and writers called him the divine Seneca; and old Bacon is full of him. One sees in him the upshot of all the Greek philosophy, how it stood in Nero’s time, when the Gods had worn out a good deal. I don’t think old Seneca believed he should live again. Death is his great resource. Think of the rocococity of a gentleman studying Seneca in the middle of February 1844 in a remarkably damp cottage. ”

“ Pray do send me your Poems, one and all: I should like very much to talk them over with you, however much you might resent me, who am no Poet, presuming to advise you who as certainly are one. That you ought to publish some of these Poems (as I think, somewhat condensed, or, at least, curtailed) I am more and more sure, having seen the very great pleasure, and deep interest, some of them have caused when read to persons of very different talents and tastes.
And now, my dear Frederic, farewell for the present. Remember, you cannot write to me too often, as far as I am concerned. ”