Edward FitzGerald

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ My dear Norton!
If Packet follows Packet duly, you will have received ere this a letter I wrote you, and posted, a few hours before yours reached me. You will have seen that I guessed at some Shadow as of Illness in your household: no wonderful conjecture in this World in any case; still less where a Life of eighty years is concerned. It is in vain to wish well: but I wish the best.
Your mention of your Mother reminded me of another Eighty years that I had forgotten to tell you of—Carlyle. ”

“ I always find that I have to repent of what I have done, not what I have left undone; and poor W. Browne used to say it was better even to repent of what [was] undone than done. You know how glad I should be if you came here: but I haven’t the Face to ask it, especially after that misfit last Summer; which was not my fault however.
I always look upon old Spedding’s as one of the most wasted Lives I know: and he is a wise Man! Twenty years ago I told him that he should knock old Bacon off; I don’t mean give him up, but wind him up at far less sacrifice of Time and Labour; and edit Shakespeare. ”

“ I think I should have thought so independent of the original: all except the dry theoretic System, which I must say I do all but skip in the Latin. Yet I venerate the earnestness of the man, and the power with which he makes some music even from his hardest Atoms; a very different Didactic from Virgil, whose Georgics, quoad Georgics, are what every man, woman, and child, must have known; but, his Teaching apart, no one loves him better than I do. I forget if Lucretius is in Dante: he should have been the Guide thro’ Hell: but perhaps he was too deep in it to get out for a Holiday. ”

“ I have never liked any Portrait of Tennyson since he grew a Beard; Allen, I suppose, has kept out of that.
If I do not write, it is because I have absolutely nothing to tell you that you have not known for the last twenty years. Here I live still, reading, and being read to, part of my time; walking abroad three or four times a day, or night, in spite of wakening a Bronchitis, which has lodged like the household ‘Brownie’ within ”

“ It is wonderful how The Sea brought up this Appetite for Greek: it likes to be called Θαλασσα and ποντος better than the wretched word ‘Sea,’ I am sure: and the Greeks (especially Æschylus—after Homer) are full of Seafaring Sounds and Allusions. I think the Murmur of the Ægean (if that is their Sea) wrought itself into their Language. How is it the Islandic (which I read is our Mother Tongue) was not more Poluphloisboi-ic?
Sophocles has almost shaken my Allegiance to Æschylus. Oh, those two Œdipuses! but then that Agamemnon! Well: one shall be the Handel and ’tother the Haydn ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am of course glad of so good a Report of John Allen. I have long been thinking of writing to him: among other things to give his Wife a Drawing Laurence made of him for me some four and twenty years ago: in full Canonicals—very serious—I think a capital Likeness on the whole, and one that I take pleasure to look at. But I think his Wife and Children have more title to it: and one never can tell what will become of one’s Things when one’s dead. This same Drawing is now in London (I hope: for, if not, it’s lost) and you should see it if you had a mind. ”

“ Another Book I have had is Wesley’s Journal, which I used to read, but gave away my Copy—to you? or Robert Groome [59a] was it? If you don’t know it, do know it; it is curious to think of this Diary of his running almost coevally with Walpole’s Letter-Diary; the two men born and dying too within a few years of one another, and with such different Lives to record. And it is remarkable to read pure, unaffected, and undying, English, while Addison and Johnson are tainted with a Style, which all the world imitated! Remember me to all. ”

“ The inland Verdure suits my Eyes better than glowing sand and pebble: and I suppose that every year I grow less and less desirous of moving.
I will scarce touch upon the Carlyle Chapter: except to say that I am sorry Froude printed the Reminiscences; at any rate, printed them before the Life which he has begun so excellently in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ for July. I think one can surely see there that Carlyle might become somewhat crazed, whether by intense meditation or Dyspepsy or both: especially as one sees that his dear good Mother was so afflicted. ”

“ What a Fortune he might have made by showing himself about as a Lecturer, as Thackeray and Dickens did; I don’t mean they did it for Vanity: but to make money: and that to spend generously. Carlyle did indeed lecture near forty years ago before he was a Lion to be shown, and when he had but few Readers. I heard his ‘Heroes’ which now seems to me one of his best Books. ”

“ Out of that window there ‘le petit’ Churchyard sketched Thorpe headland under an angry Sunset of Oct. 55 which heralded a memorable Gale that washed up a poor Woman with a Babe in her arms: and old Mitford had them buried with an inscribed Stone in the old Churchyard, peopled with dead ‘Mariners’; and Inscription and Stone are now gone. Yesterday I got out in a Boat, drizzly as it was: but to-day there is too much Sea to put off. I am to be home by the week’s end, if not before. The melancholy of Slaughden last night, with the same Sloops sticking sidelong in the mud as sixty years ago! ”

“ The World, I think, may justly resent our being and interfering all over the Globe. Once more I say, would we were a little, peaceful, unambitious, trading, Nation, like—the Dutch! . . .
Adieu, My Dear Cowell; once more, Adieu. I doubt if you can read what I have written. Do not forget my Love to your Wife. I wonder if we are ever to meet again: you would be most disappointed if we were!
To W. H. Thompson.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
Dec. 9/61.
My dear Thompson,
The MS. came safe to hand yesterday, thank you: and came out of its Envelope like a Ray of Old Times to my Eyes. ”

“ I despatched Spedding’s letter to your Master yesterday; I daresay you have read it: for there was nothing extraordinary wicked in it. But, he to talk of my perversity! . . .
My Sir Joshua is a darling. A pretty young Woman (‘Girl’ I won’t call her) sitting with a turtle-dove in her lap, while its mate is supposed to be flying down to it from the window. I say ‘supposed,’ for Sir J. who didn’t know much of the drawing of Birds, any more than of Men and Women, has made a thing like a stuffed Bird clawing down like a Parrot. ”

“ I shall soon be going to old ugly Lowestoft again to be with Nephews and Nieces. The Great Man . . . is yet there: commanding a Crew of those who prefer being his Men to having command of their own. And they are right; for the man is Royal, tho’ with the faults of ancient Vikings. . . . His Glory is somewhat marred; but he looks every inch a King in his Lugger now. At home (when he is there, and not at the Tavern) he sits among his Dogs, Cats, Birds, etc., always with a great Dog following abroad, and aboard. This is altogether the Greatest Man I have known.
To C. E. Norton.
Woodbridge. ”

“ She, though a wretchedly sickly woman, and within two months of her confinement when he died, has somehow weathered it all beyond Expectation. She has her children to attend to, and be her comfort in turn: and though having lost what most she loved yet has something to love still, and to be beloved by. ”

“ I have come here to wind up accounts for our Herring-lugger: much against us, as the season has been a bad one. My dear Captain, who looks in his Cottage like King Alfred in the Story, was rather saddened by all this, as he had prophesied better things. I tell him that if he is but what I think him—and surely my sixty years of considering men will not so deceive me at last!—I would rather lose money with him than gain it with others. ”

“ But then one should have done something worthy of ever so little a niche in Trinity Library; and that I do know is not my case. I have several times told the Master what I think, and know, of my small Escapades in print; nice little things, some of them, which may interest a few people (mostly friends, or through friends) for a few years. But I am always a little ashamed of having made my leisure and idleness the means of putting myself forward in print, when really so many much better people keep silent, having other work to do. ”

“ Don’t they? I am now a good [deal] about in a new Boat I have built, and thought (as Johnson took Cocker’s Arithmetic with him on travel, because he shouldn’t exhaust it) so I would take Dante and Homer with me, instead of Mudie’s Books, which I read through directly. I took Dante by way of slow Digestion: not having looked at him for some years: but I am glad to find I relish him as much as ever: he atones with the Sea; as you know does the Odyssey—these are the Men! ”

“ You say you like my Letters: which I say is liking what comes from this old Country, more yours than mine. I have heard that some of your People would even secure a Brick, or Stone, from some old Church here to imbed in some new Church a-building over the Atlantic. Plenty of such materials might be had, for this foolish People are restoring, and rebuilding, old Village Churches that have grown together in their Fields for Centuries. Only yesterday I wrote to decline helping such a work on a poor little Church I remember these sixty years. ”

“ I have been interested in the Memoir and Letters of C. Sumner: a thoroughly sincere, able, and (I should think) affectionate man to a few; without Humour, I suppose, or much artistic Feeling. You might like to look over a slight, and probably partial, Memoir of A. de Musset, by his Brother, who (whether well or ill) leaves out the Absinthe, which is generally supposed to have shortened the Life of that man of Genius. Think of Clarissa being one of his favourite Books; he could not endure the modern Parisian Romance. ”

“ I had just been hammering out some Notes on Catullus, by our Cambridge Munro, Editor of Lucretius, which you ought to have; English Notes to both, and the Prose Version of Lucretius quite readable by itself. Well, when Keats came, I scarce felt a change from Catullus: both such fiery Souls as wore out their Bodies early; and I can even imagine Keats writing such filthy Libels against any one he had a spite against, even Armitage Brown, had Keats lived two thousand years ago. ”

“ My Canon is, there is no plagiarism when he who adopts has proved that he could originate what he adopts, and a great deal more: which certainly absolves Shakespeare from any such Charge—even ‘The Cloud capt Towers, etc.’ That Passage in Othello about the Propontic and the Hellespont, was, I have read, an afterthought, after reading some Travel: and, like so many Afterthoughts, I must think, a Blunder: breaking the Torrent of Passion with a piece of Natural History. One observes it particularly when acted: the actor down on his Knees, etc. ”

“ And now I have written more than enough for yourself and me: whose Eyes may be the worse for it to-morrow. I still go about in Blue Glasses, and flinch from Lamp and Candle. Pray let me know about your own Eyes, and your own Self; and believe me always sincerely yours
Littlegrange.
May 8, [1881] .
If still at Leamington, you look upon a sight which I used to like well; that is, the blue Avon (as in this weather it will be) roaming through buttercup meadows all the way to Warwick; unless those meadows are all built over since I was there some forty years ago. . . .
I am got back to my Sévigné! ”

“ I had your printed Report on Olympia, which I do not pretend to be a Judge [of] . I lent it to one who thinks he returned it, but certainly did not: and I wanted to lend it to another much more competent Judge, very much interested in the Subject, Edward Cowell, a Brother Professor of yours at our Cambridge: the most learned man there, I believe, and the most amiable and delightful, I believe, also. ”