Transcribed from the 1901 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
LETTERS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
new york: the macmillan company
1901
All rights reserved
First Edition 1894. Reprinted 1901
LETTERS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD
To E. B. Cowell.
88 Gt. Portland St., London,
Jan. 13/59.
My dear Cowell,
I have been here some five weeks: but before my Letter reaches you shall probably have slid back into the Country somewhere. This is my old Lodging, but new numbered. I have been almost alone here: having seen even Spedding and Donne but two or three times. They are well and go on as before. Spedding has got out the seventh volume of Bacon, I believe: with Capital Prefaces to Henry VII., etc. But I have not yet seen it. After vol. viii. (I think) there is to be a Pause: till Spedding has set the Letters to his Mind. Then we shall see what he can make of his Blackamoor. . . .
I am almost ashamed to write to you, so much
have I forsaken Persian, and even all good Books of late. There is no one now to ‘prick the Sides of my Intent’; Vaulting Ambition having long failed to do so! I took my Omar from Fraser [? Parker], as I saw he didn’t care for it; and also I want to enlarge it to near as much again, of such Matter as he would not dare to put in Fraser. If I print it, I shall do the impudence of quoting your Account of Omar, and your Apology for his Freethinking: it is not wholly my Apology, but you introduced him to me, and your excuse extends to that which you have not ventured to quote, and I do. I like your Apology extremely also, allowing its Point of View. I doubt you will repent of ever having showed me the Book. I should like well to have the Lithograph Copy of Omar which you tell of in your Note. My Translation has its merit: but it misses a main one in Omar, which I will leave you to find out. The Latin Versions, if they were corrected into decent Latin, would be very much better. . . . I have forgotten to write out for you a little Quatrain which Binning found written in Persepolis; the Persian Tourists having the same propensity as English to write their Names and Sentiments on their national Monuments. [2]
* * * * *
In the early part of 1859 his friend William Browne was terribly injured by his horse falling upon him and lingered in great agony for several weeks.
Goldington, Bedford.
March 26 [1859].
My dear Donne,
Your folks told you on what Errand I left your house so abruptly. I was not allowed to see W. B. the day I came: nor yesterday till 3 p.m.; when, poor fellow, he tried to write a line to me, like a child’s! and I went, and saw, no longer the gay Lad, nor the healthy Man, I had known: but a wreck of all that: a Face like Charles I. (after decapitation almost) above the Clothes: and the poor shattered Body underneath lying as it had lain eight weeks; such a case as the Doctor says he had never known. Instead of the light utterance of other days too, came the slow painful syllables in a far lower Key: and when the old familiar words, ‘Old Fellow—Fitz’—etc., came forth, so spoken, I broke down too in spite of foregone Resolution.
They thought he’d die last Night: but this Morning he is a little better: but no hope. He has spoken of me in the Night, and (if he wishes) I shall go again, provided his Wife and Doctor approve. But it agitates him: and Tears he could not wipe away came to his Eyes. The poor Wife bears up wonderfully.
Geldestone Hall, Beccles.
April 27 [1859]
My dear Cowell,
Above is the Address you had better direct to in future. I have had a great Loss. W. Browne was fallen upon and half crushed by his horse near three months ago: and though the Doctors kept giving hopes while he lay patiently for two months in a condition no one else could have borne for a Fortnight, at last they could do no more, nor Nature neither: and he sunk. I went to see him before he died—the comely spirited Boy I had known first seven and twenty years ago lying all shattered and Death in his Face and Voice. . . .
Well, this is so: and there is no more to be said about it. It is one of the things that reconcile me to my own stupid Decline of Life—to the crazy state of the world—Well—no more about it.
I sent you poor old Omar who has his kind of Consolation for all these Things. I doubt you will regret you ever introduced him to me. And yet you would have me print the original, with many worse things than I have translated. The Bird Epic might be finished at once: but ‘cui bono?’ No one cares for such things: and there are doubtless so many better things to care about. I hardly know why I print any of these things, which nobody buys; and I scarce now see the few
I give them to. But when one has done one’s best, and is sure that that best is better than so many will take pains to do, though far from the best that might be done, one likes to make an end of the matter by Print. I suppose very few People have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Cost, a Thing must live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse Life if one can’t retain the Original’s better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle. I shall be very well pleased to see the new MS. of Omar. I shall one day (if I live) print the ‘Birds,’ and a strange experiment on old Calderon’s two great Plays; and then shut up Shop in the Poetic Line. Adieu: Give my love to the Lady: and believe me yours very truly E. F. G.
You see where those Persepolitan Verses [5] come from. I wonder you were not startled with the metre, though maimed a bit.
To T. Carlyle.
Geldestone Hall, Beccles.
June 20/59.
Dear Carlyle,
Very soon after I called and saw Mrs. Carlyle I got a violent cold, which (being neglected) flew to my Ears, and settled into such a Deafness I
couldn’t hear the Postman knock nor the Omnibus roll. When I began (after more than a Month) to begin recovering of this (though still so deaf as to determine not to be a Bore to any one else) I heard from Bedford that my poor W. Browne (who got you a Horse some fifteen years ago) had been fallen on and crushed all through the middle Body by one of his own: and I then kept expecting every Postman’s knock was to announce his Death. He kept on however in a shattered Condition which the Doctors told me scarce any one else would have borne a Week; kept on for near two Months, and then gave up his honest Ghost. I went to bid him Farewell: and then came here (an Address you remember), only going to Lowestoft (on the Sea) to entertain my old George Crabbe’s two Daughters, who, now living inland, are glad of a sight of the old German Sea, and also perhaps of poor Me. I return to Lowestoft (for a few days only) to-morrow, and shall perhaps see the Steam of your Ship passing the Shore. I have always been wanting to sail to Scotland: but my old Fellow-traveller is gone! His Accident was the more vexatious as quite unnecessary—so to say—returning quietly from Hunting. But there’s no use talking of it. Your Destinies and Silences have settled it.
I really had wished to go and see Mrs. Carlyle again: I won’t say you, because I don’t think in your heart you care to be disturbed; and I am
glad to believe that, with all your Pains, you are better than any of us, I do think. You don’t care what one thinks of your Books: you know I love so many: I don’t care so much for Frederick so far as he’s gone: I suppose you don’t neither. I was thinking of you the other Day reading in Aubrey’s Wiltshire how he heard Cromwell one Day at Dinner (I think) at Hampton Court say that Devonshire showed the best Farming of any Part of England he had been in. Did you know all the Dawson Turner Letters?
I see Spedding directs your Letter: which is nearly all I see of his MS.: though he would let me see enough of it if there were a good Turn to be done.
Please to give my best Remembrances to Mrs. Carlyle, and believe me yours sincerely,
Edward FitzGerald.
To Mrs. Charles Allen.
Lowestoft, October 16/59.
My dear Mrs. Allen,
In passing through London a week ago I found a very kind letter from you directed to my London Lodging. This will explain why it has not been sooner answered. As I do not know your Address, I take the Opportunity of enclosing my Reply to John Allen, of whom I have not heard since May.
I have been in these Suffolk and Norfolk Parts ever since I left London in March to see my poor Lad die in Bedford. The Lad I first met in the Tenby Lodging house twenty-seven years ago—not sixteen then—and now broken to pieces and scarce conscious, after two months such suffering as the Doctor told me scarce any one would have borne for a Fortnight. They never told him it was all over with him until [within] ten Days of Death: though every one else seem’d to know it must be so—and he did not wish to die yet.
I won’t write more of a Matter that you can have but little Interest in, and that I am as well not thinking about. I came here partly to see his Widow, and so (as I hope) to avoid having to go to Bedford for the Present. 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. There are worse Conditions than that.
I am not going to be long here: but hope to winter somewhere in Suffolk (London very distasteful now)—But here again:—my good Hostess with whom I have lodged in Suffolk is dead too: and I must wait till that Household settles down a little.
If it ever gives you pleasure to write to me,
it gives me real Pleasure to hear of you: and I am sincerely grateful for your kind Remembrance of me.
‘Geldestone Hall—Beccles’ or ‘Farlingay Hall, Woodbridge,’ are pretty sure Addresses. Please to remember me kindly to your Husband and believe me
Yours very sincerely,
Edwd FitzGerald.
Bath House, Lowestoft.
October 26 [1859].
Dear Mrs. Allen,
I must thank you for your so kind Letter, and kind Invitation. But if I was but five Days with my old College Friend after twelve years’ Promise, and then didn’t go just on to Teignmouth to see my Sister, and her Family, I must not talk of going elsewhere—even to Prees—where John is always good enough to be asking me: even in a Letter To day received.
By the way, Last Saturday at Norwich while I was gazing into a Shop, a Woman’s Voice said, ‘How d’ ye do, Mr. FitzGerald?’ I looked up: a young Woman too, whom (of course) I didn’t know. ‘You don’t remember me, Andalusia Allen that was!’ Now Mrs. Day. I had not seen her since ’52, a Girl of, I suppose, twelve, playing
some Character in a Family Play. John’s Letter too tells me of his son going to College.
But Tenby—I don’t remember a pleasanter Place. I can now hear the Band on the Steamer as it left the little Pier for Bristol, the Steamer that brought me and the poor Boy now in his Grave to that Boardinghouse. It was such weather as now howls about this Lodging when one of those poor starved Players was drowned on the Sands, and was carried past our Windows after Dinner: I often remember the dull Trot of Men up the windy Street, and our running to the Window, and the dead Head, hair, and Shoulders hurried past. That was Tragedy, poor Fellow, whatever Parts he had played before.
I think you remember me with Kindness because accidentally associated with your old Freestone in those pleasant Days, that also were among the last of your Sister’s Life. Her too I can see, with her China-rose complexion: in the Lilac Gown she wore.
I keep on here from Week to week, partly because no other Place offers: but I almost doubt if I shall be here beyond next week. Not in this Lodging anyhow: which is wretchedly ‘rafty’ and cold; lets the Rain in when it Rains: and the Dust of the Shore when it drives: as both have been doing by turns all Yesterday and To day. I was cursing all this as I was shivering here by myself last Night: and in the Morning I hear of
three Wrecks off the Sands, and indeed meet five shipwreckt Men with a Troop of Sailors as I walk out before Breakfast. Oh Dear!
Please remember me to your ‘Gude Man’ and believe me yours truly,
E. F. G.
Pray do excuse all this Blotting: my Paper won’t dry To day.
To W. H. Thompson.
10 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft.
Nov. 27, 1859.
My dear Thompson,
After a Fortnight’s Visit to my Sister’s (where I caught Cold which flew at once to my Ears, and there hangs) I returned hither, as the nearest Place to go to, and here shall be till Christmas at all Events. I wish to avoid London this winter: and indeed seem almost to have done with it, except for a Day’s Business or Sightseeing every now and then. Often should I like to roam about old Cambridge, and hear St. Mary’s Chimes at Midnight—but—but! This Place of course is dull enough: but here’s the Old Sea (a dirty Dutch one, to be sure) and Sands, and Sailors, a very fine Race of Men, far superior to those in Regent Street. Also the Dutchmen (an ugly set whom I can’t help liking for old Neighbours) come over in their broad Bottoms and take in Water at a
Creek along the Shore. But I believe the East winds get very fierce after Christmas, when the Sea has cooled down. You won’t come here, to be sure: or I should be very glad to smoke a Cigar, and have a Chat: and would take care to have a Fire in your Bedroom this time: a Negligence I was very sorry for in London.
I read, or was told, they wouldn’t let old Alfred’s Bust into your Trinity. They are right, I think, to let no one in there (as it should be in Westminster Abbey) till a Hundred Years are past; when, after too much Admiration (perhaps) and then a Reaction of undue Dis-esteem, Men have settled into some steady Opinion on the subject: supposing always that the Hero survives so long, which of itself goes so far to decide the Question. No doubt A. T. will do that.
To W. F. Pollock.
10 Marine Terrace,
Lowestoft.
Febr. 23/60.
My dear Pollock,
‘Me voilà ici’ still! having weathered it out so long. No bad Place, I assure you, though you who are accustomed to Pall Mall, Clubs, etc., wouldn’t like it. Mudie finds one out easily: and the London Library too: and altogether I can’t complain of not getting such drowsy Books as I want. Hakluyt lasted a long while: then came Captain Cook, whom
I hadn’t read since I was a Boy, and whom I was very glad to see again. But he soon evaporates in his large Type Quartos. I can hardly manage Emerson Tennent’s Ceylon: a very dry Catalogue Raisonnée of the Place. A little Essay of De Quincey’s gave me a better Idea of it (as I suppose) in some twenty or thirty pages. Anyhow, I prefer Lowestoft, considering the Snakes, Sand-leaches, Mosquitos, etc. I suppose Russell’s Indian Diary is over-coloured: but I feel sure it’s true in the Main: and he has the Art to make one feel in the thick of it; quite enough in the Thick, however. Sir C. Napier came here to try and get the Beachmen to enlist in the Naval Reserve. Not one would go: they won’t give up their Independence: and so really half starve here during Winter. Then Spring comes and they go and catch the Herrings which, if left alone, would multiply by Millions by Autumn: and so kill their Golden Goose. They are a strange set of Fellows. I think a Law ought to be made against their Spring Fishing: more important, for their own sakes, than Game Laws.
I laid out half a crown on your Fraser [13]: and liked much of it very much: especially the Beginning about the Advantage the Novelist has over the Play-writer. A little too much always about Miss Austen, whom yet I think quite capital in a Circle I have found quite unendurable to walk in. Thackeray’s first Number was famous, I thought: his own little Roundabout
Paper so pleasant: but the Second Number, I say, lets the Cockney in already: about Hogarth: Lewes is vulgar: and I don’t think one can care much for Thackeray’s Novel. He is always talking so of himself, too. I have been very glad to find I could take to a Novel again, in Trollope’s Barchester Towers, etc.: not perfect, like Miss Austen: but then so much wider Scope: and perfect enough to make me feel I know the People though caricatured or carelessly drawn. I doubt if you can read my writing here: or whether it will be worth your Pains to do so. If you can, or can not, one Day write me a Line, which I will read. I suppose when the Fields and Hedges begin to grow green I shall move a little further inland to be among them.
To Mrs. Charles Allen.
Farlingay: Woodbridge,
June 2/60.
Dear Mrs. Allen,
Your kind Note has reacht me here after a Fortnight’s abode at my old Lodgings in London. In London I have not been for more than a year, unless passing through it in September, and have no thought of going up at present. I don’t think you were there last Spring, were you? Or perhaps I was gone before you arrived, as I generally used to get off as soon as it began to fill, and the Country to become
amiable. Here at last we have the ‘May’ coming out: there it is on some Thorns before my Windows, and the Tower of Woodbridge Church beyond: and beyond that some low Hills that stretch with Furze and Broom to the Seaside, about ten miles off.
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. For you don’t seem to find your way to Frees any more than I do: I should go if there weren’t a large Family. Mrs. John is always very kind to me. I do think it is very kind of you too to remember and write to me: at any rate I do answer Letters, which many better Men don’t.
Please to remember me to your Husband: and believe me unforgetful of the Good old Days, and of you, and yours,
Edward FitzGerald.
Farlingay: Woodbridge,
Septr. 9/60.
My dear Mrs. Allen,
It is very kind of you to write to me. Ah! how I can fancy the Stillness, and the Colour, of your pretty Tenby!—now eight and twenty years since seen! But I can’t summon Resolution to go to it: and daily get worse and worse at moving any where, a common Fate as we grow older.
Your Note came in an Enclosure from your Cousin John, who seems to flourish with Wife and Children. It is Children who keep alive one’s Interest in Life: that is to say, if one happens to like one’s Children.
I have had to stay with me the two sons of my poor Friend killed last year: he whom I first made Acquaintance with at your very Tenby. As I haven’t found Courage to go to their Country, their Mother would have them come here, and I took them to our Seaside; not a beautiful Coast like yours—no Rocks, no Sands, and few Trees—but yet liked because remembered by me as long as I can remember. Anyhow, there are Ships, Boats, and Sailors: and the Boys were well pleased with all that. The place we went to is called Aldborough: spelt Aldeburgh: and is the Birth place of the Poet Crabbe, who also has Daguerrotyped much of the Character of the Place in his Poems. You send me some Lines about the Sea: what if I return you four of his?
Still as I gaze upon the Sea I find
Its waves an Image of my restless mind:
Here Thought on Thought: there Wave on Wave succeeds,
Their Produce—idle Thought and idle Weeds!
Adieu: please to remember me to your Husband: and believe me yours ever very sincerely,
Edward FitzGerald.
To George Crabbe.
Market Hill, Woodbridge,
Decr. 28/60.
My dear George,
. . . I forgot to tell you I really ran to London three weeks ago: by the morning Express, and was too glad to rush back by the Evening Ditto. I went up for a Business I of course did not accomplish: did not call on, or see, a Friend: couldn’t get into the National Gallery: and didn’t care a straw for Holman Hunt’s Picture. No doubt, there is Thought and Care in it: but what an outcome of several Years and sold for several Thousands! What Man with the Elements of a Great Painter could come out with such a costive Thing after so long waiting! Think of the Acres of Canvas Titian or Reynolds would have covered with grand Outlines and deep Colours in the Time it has taken to niggle this Miniature! The Christ seemed to me only a wayward Boy: the Jews, Jews no doubt: the Temple I dare say very correct in its Detail: but think of
even Rembrandt’s Woman in Adultery at the National Gallery; a much smaller Picture, but how much vaster in Space and Feeling! Hunt’s Picture stifled me with its Littleness. I think Ruskin must see what his System has led to.
I have just got Lady Waterford’s ‘Babes in the Wood,’ which are well enough, pretty in Colour: only, why has she made so bad a Portrait of one of her chief Performers, whose Likeness is so easily got at, the Robin Redbreast? This Lady Waterford was at Gillingham this Summer: and my Sister Eleanor said (as Thackeray had done) she was something almost to worship for unaffected Dignity.
Market-Hill, Woodbridge.
Whit-Monday [May 20, 1861].
My dear George,
. . . I take pleasure in my new little Boat: and last week went with her to Aldbro’; and she ‘behaved’ very well both going and returning; though, to be sure, there was not much to try her Temper. I am so glad of this fine Whit-Monday, when so many Holiday-makers will enjoy theirselves, and so many others make a little money by their Enjoyment. Our ‘Rifles’ are going to march to Grundisburgh, manuring and skrimmaging as they go, and also (as the Captain [18] hopes) recruiting. He is a right good little Fellow, I do believe. It is a shame the Gentry
hereabout are so indifferent in the Matter: they subscribe next to nothing: and give absolutely nothing in the way of Entertainment or Attention to the Corps. But we are split up into the pettiest possible Squirarchy, who want to make the utmost of their little territory: cut down all the Trees, level all the old Violet Banks, and stop up all the Footways they can. The old pleasant way from Hasketon to Bredfield is now a Desert. I was walking it yesterday and had the pleasure of breaking down and through some Bushes and Hurdles put to block up a fallen Stile. I thought what your Father would have said of it all. And really it is the sad ugliness of our once pleasant Fields that half drives me to the Water where the Power of the Squirarchy stops!
To E. B. Cowell.
Market Hill: Woodbridge:
May 22/61.
My dear Cowell,
I receive two Books, viâ Geldestone, from you: Khold-i-barin (including a Lecture of your own) and ‘Promises of Christianity’: I think directed in your Wife’s hand. The Lecture was, I doubt not, very well adapted to its purpose: the other two Publications I must look at by and bye. I can’t tell you how indolent I have become about Books: some Travels and Biographies from Mudie are nearly all I read now. Then, I have only been in London
some dozen hours these two years past: my last Expedition was this winter for five hours: when I ran home here like a beaten Dog. So I have little to tell you of Friends as of Books. Spedding hammers away at his Bacon (impudently forestalled by H. Dixon’s Book). Carlyle is not so up to work as of old (I hear). Indeed, he wrote me he was ill last Summer, and obliged to cut Frederick and be off to Scotland and Idleness: the Doctors warned him of Congestion of Brain: a warning he scorned. But what more likely? The last account I had of Alfred Tennyson from Mrs. A. was a good one. Frederic T. is settled at Jersey. I cannot make up my mind to go to see any of these good, noble men: I only hope they believe I do not forget, or cease to regard them.
My chief Amusement in Life is Boating, on River and Sea. The Country about here is the Cemetery of so many of my oldest Friends: and the petty race of Squires who have succeeded only use the Earth for an Investment: cut down every old Tree: level every Violet Bank: and make the old Country of my Youth hideous to me in my Decline. There are fewer Birds to be heard, as fewer Trees for them to resort to. So I get to the Water: where Friends are not buried nor Pathways stopt up: but all is, as the Poets say, as Creation’s Dawn beheld. I am happiest going in my little Boat round the Coast to Aldbro’, with some Bottled Porter and some Bread and Cheese, and some good rough Soul who works
the Boat and chews his Tobacco in peace. An Aldbro’ Sailor talking of my Boat said—‘She go like a Wiolin, she do!’ What a pretty Conceit, is it not? As the Bow slides over the Strings in a liquid Tune. Another man was talking yesterday of a great Storm: ‘and, in a moment, all as calm as a Clock.’
By the bye, Forby reasons that our Suffolk third person singular ‘It go, etc.,’ is probably right as being the old Icelandic form. Why should the 3rd p. sing. be the only one that varies. And in the auxiliaries May, Shall, Can, etc., there is no change for the 3rd pers. I incline to the Suffolk because of its avoiding a hiss.
To George Crabbe.
Market-Hill, Woodbridge.
June 4/61.
My dear George,
Let me know when you come into these Parts, and be sure I shall be glad to entertain you as well as I can if you come while I am here. Nor am I likely to be away further than Aldbro’, so far as I see. I do meditate crossing one fine Day to Holland: to see the Hague, Paul Potter, and some Rembrandt at Rotterdam. This, however, is not to be done in my little Boat: but in some Trader from Ipswich. I also talk of a cruise to Edinburgh in one of their Schooners. But both these Excursions I reserve for such hot weather as may make a retreat from the Town agreeable. I make no advances to Farlingay,
because (as yet) we have not had any such Heat as to bake the Houses here: and, beside, I am glad to be by the River. It is strange how sad the Country has become to me. I went inland to see Acton’s Curiosities before the Auction: and was quite glad to get back to the little Town again. I am quite clear I must live the remainder of my Life in a Town: but a little one, and with a strip of Garden to saunter in. . . .
I go sometimes to see the Rifles drill, and shoot at their Target, and have got John [22] to ask them up to Boulge to practise some day: I must insinuate that he should offer them some Beer when they get there. It is a shame the Squires do nothing in the matter: take no Interest: offer no Encouragement, beyond a Pound or two in Money. And who are those who have most interest at stake in case of Rifles being really wanted? But I am quite assured that this Country is dying, as other Countries die, as Trees die, atop first. The lower Limbs are making all haste to follow. . . .
By the bye, don’t let me forget to ask you to bring with you my Persian Dictionary in case you come into these Parts. I read very very little: and get very desultory: but when Winter comes again must take to some dull Study to keep from Suicide, I suppose. The River, the Sea, etc., serve to divert one now.
Adieu. These long Letters prove one’s Idleness.
To R. C. Trench. [23a]
Market-Hill, Woodbridge.
July 3/61.
Dear Doctor Trench,
Thank you sincerely for the delightful little Journal [23b] which I had from you yesterday, and only wished to be a dozen times as long. The beautiful note at p. 73 speaks of much yet unprinted! It is a pity Mrs. Kemble had not read p. 79. I thought in the Night of ‘the subdued Voice of Good Sense’ and ‘The Eye that invites you to look into it.’ I doubt I can read, more or less attentively, most personal Memoirs: but I am equally sure of the superiority of this, in its Shrewdness, Humour, natural Taste, and Good Breeding. One is sorry for the account of Lord Nelson: but one cannot doubt it. It was at the time when he was intoxicated, I suppose, with Glory and Lady Hamilton. What your Mother says of the Dresden Madonna reminds me of what Tennyson once said: that the Attitude of The Child was that of a Man: but perhaps not the less right for all that. As to the Countenance, he said that scarce any Man’s Face could look so grave and rapt as a Baby’s could at times. He once said of his own Child’s, ‘He was a whole hour this morning worshipping the Sunshine
playing on the Bedpost.’ He never writes Letters or Journals: but I hope People will be found to remember some of the things he has said as naturally as your Mother wrote them. [24]
To W. H. Thompson.
Market-Hill, Woodbridge.
July 15/61.
My dear Thompson,
I was very glad to hear of you again. You need never take it to Conscience, not answering my Letters, further than that I really do want to hear you are well, and where you are, and what doing, from time to time. I have absolutely nothing to tell about myself, not having moved from this place since I last wrote, unless to our Sea coast at Aldbro’, whither I run, or sail, from time to time to idle with the Sailors in their Boats or on their Beach. I love their childish ways: but they too degenerate. As to reading, my Studies have lain chiefly in some back Volumes of the New Monthly Magazine and some French Memoirs. Trench was good enough to send me a little unpublished Journal by his Mother: a
very pretty thing indeed. I suppose he did this in return for one or two Papers on Oriental Literature which Cowell had sent me from India, and which I thought might interest Trench. I am very glad to hear old Spedding is really getting his Share of Bacon into Print: I doubt if it will be half as good as the ‘Evenings,’ where Spedding was in the Passion which is wanted to fill his Sail for any longer Voyage.
I have not seen his Paper on English Hexameters [25] which you tell me of: but I will now contrive to do so. I, however, believe in them: and I think the ever-recurring attempts that way show there is some ground for such belief. To be sure, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Quadrature of the Circle, have had at least as many Followers. . . .
It was finding some Bits of Letters and Poems of old Alfred’s that made me wish to restore those I gave you to the number, as marking a by-gone time to me. That they will not so much do to you, who did not happen to save them from the Fire when the Volumes of 1842 were printing. But I would waive that if you found it good or possible to lay them up in Trinity Library in the Closet with Milton’s! Otherwise, I would still look at them now and then for the few years I suppose I have to live. . . .
This is a terribly long Letter: but, if it be legible sufficiently, will perhaps do as if I were spinning it in talk under the walls of the Cathedral. I dare not
now even talk of going any visits: I can truly say I wish you could drop in here some Summer Day and take a Float with me on our dull River, which does lead to The Sea some ten miles off. . .
You must think I have become very nautical, by all this: haul away at ropes, swear, dance Hornpipes, etc. But it is not so: I simply sit in Boat or Vessel as in a moving Chair, dispensing a little Grog and Shag to those who do the work.
To E. B. Cowell.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
December 7/61.
My dear Cowell,
. . . I shall look directly for the passages in Omar and Hafiz which you refer to and clear up, though I scarce ever see the Persian Character now. I suppose you would think it a dangerous thing to edit Omar: else, who so proper? Nay, are you not the only Man to do it? And he certainly is worth good re-editing. I thought him from the first the most remarkable of the Persian Poets: and you keep finding out in him Evidences of logical Fancy which I had not dreamed of. I dare say these logical Riddles are not his best: but they are yet evidences of a Strength of mind which our Persian Friends rarely exhibit, I think. I always said about Cowley, Donne, etc., whom Johnson calls the metaphysical Poets, that their very Quibbles of Fancy showed a
power of Logic which could follow Fancy through such remote Analogies. This is the case with Calderon’s Conceits also. I doubt I have given but a very one-sided version of Omar: but what I do only comes up as a Bubble to the Surface, and breaks: whereas you, with exact Scholarship, might make a lasting impression of such an Author. So I say of Jeláluddín, whom you need not edit in Persian, perhaps, unless in selections, which would be very good work: but you should certainly translate for us some such selections exactly in the way in which you did that apologue of Azräel. [27] I don’t know the value of the Indian Philosophy, etc., which you tell me is a fitter exercise for the Reason: but I am sure that you should give us some of the Persian I now speak of, which you can do all so easily to yourself; yes, as a holiday recreation, you say, to your Indian Studies. As to India being ‘your Place,’ it may be: but as to your being lost in England, that could not be. You know I do not flatter. . . .
I declare I should like to go to India as well as any where: and I believe it might be the best thing for me to do. But, always slow at getting under way as I have been all my Life, what is to be done with one after fifty! I am sure there is no longer any great pleasure living in this Country, so tost with perpetual Alarms as it is. One Day we are all
in Arms about France. To-day we are doubting if To-morrow we may not be at War to the Knife with America! I say still, as I used, we have too much Property, Honour, etc., on our Hands: our outward Limbs go on lengthening while our central Heart beats weaklier: I say, as I used, we should give up something before it is forced from us. 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 wish I had secured more leaves from that old ‘Butcher’s Book’ torn up in old Spedding’s Rooms in 1842 when the Press went to work with, I think, the Last of old Alfred’s Best. But that, I am told, is only a ‘Crotchet.’ However, had I taken some more of the Pages that went into
the Fire, after serving in part for Pipe-lights, I might have enriched others with that which AT [29] himself would scarce have grudged, jealous as he is of such sort of Curiosity.
I have seen no more of Tannhäuser than the Athenæum showed me; and certainly do not want to see more. One wonders that Men of some Genius (as I suppose these are) should so disguise it in Imitation: but, if they be very young men, this is the natural course, is it not? By and by they may find their own Footing.
As to my own Peccadilloes in Verse, which never pretend to be original, this is the story of Rubáiyát. I had translated them partly for Cowell: young Parker asked me some years ago for something for Fraser, and I gave him the less wicked of these to use if he chose. He kept them for two years without using: and as I saw he did’nt want them I printed some copies with Quaritch; and, keeping some for myself, gave him the rest. Cowell, to whom I sent a Copy, was naturally alarmed at it; he being a very religious Man: nor have I given any other Copy but to George Borrow, to whom I had once lent the Persian, and to old Donne when he was down here the other Day, to whom I was showing a Passage in another Book which brought my old Omar up.
(end of letter lost.)
Market Hill, Woodbridge.
March 19/62.
My dear Thompson,
Thanks for your Letter in the middle of graver occupations. It will give me very great pleasure if you will come here: but not if you only do so out of kindness; I mean, if you have no other call of Business or Pleasure to yourself. For I don’t deserve—
You should have sent me some Photograph. I hate them nearly all: but S. Rice [30] was very good. I wonder you don’t turn out well: I suppose, too black, is it? It is generally florid people, I think, who fail: yet, strange to say, my Brother Peter has come quite handsome in the Process. . . .
I am all for a little Flattery in Portraits: that is, so far as, I think, the Painter or Sculptor should try at something more agreeable than anything he sees sitting to him: when People look either bored, or smirking: he should give the best possible Aspect which the Features before him might wear, even if the Artist had not seen that Aspect. Especially when he works for Friends or Kinsfolk: for even the plainest face has looked handsome to them at some happy moment, and just such we like to have perpetuated.
Now, I really do feel ashamed when you ask about my Persian Translations, though they are
all very well: only very little affairs. I really have not the face to send to Milnes direct: but I send you four Copies which I have found in a Drawer here to do as you will with. This will save Milnes, or any one else, the bore of writing to me to acknowledge it.
My old Boat has been altered, I hope not spoiled; and I shall soon be preparing for the Water—and Mud. I don’t think one can reckon on warm weather till after the Longest Day: but if you should come before, it will surely be warm enough to walk, or drive, if not to sail; and Leaves will be green, if the Tide should be out.
You would almost think I wanted to repay you in Compliment if I told you I regarded even your hasty Letters as excellent in all respects. I do, however: but I do not wish you to write one when you are busy or disinclined.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
Sept. 29/62.
My dear Thompson,
‘What Cheer, ho!’ I somehow fancy that a Line of Nonsense will catch you before you leave Ely: and yet, now I come to think, you will have left Ely, probably, and will be returning in another Fortnight to Cambridge for the Term. Well, I will direct to Cambridge then; and my Note shall await you there, and you need not answer it till
some very happy hour of Leisure and Inclination. As to Inclination, indeed, I don’t think you will ever have much of that, toward writing such Letters, I mean; what sensible Man after forty has? You have done so much more (in my Eyes, and perhaps so much less in your own) coming all this way to see me! I did wonder at the Goodness of that. I suppose Spedding didn’t tell you that I wrote to him to say so. It was very unlucky I was out when you came: I have often thought of that with vexation.
Well, I have gone on Boating, etc., just the same ever since. And just now I have been applying to Spring Rice to use his Influence to get a larger Buoy laid at the mouth of our River; across which lies a vile Bar of shifting Sand, and such a little Bit of a Buoy to mark it that we often almost miss it going in and out, and are in danger of running on the Shoal; which would break the Boat to Pieces if not drown us. Here is a fine Piece of Information to a Canon of Ely and Professor of Greek at Cambridge!
Spring Rice does not speak well, I think, of his health; not at all well; and his Handwriting looks shaky. What a Loyal Kind Heart it is!
Market hill: Woodbridge,
Nov. 28/62.
My dear Donne,
I talk indignantly against others bothering you, and do worse than all myself, I think, what with Bookbindings, Dressing-gowns, etc. (N.B. You know that the last is only in case when you are going your Rounds to St. James, etc.) Now I have a little Query to make: which, not being even so much out of your way, won’t I hope trouble you. I remember Thompson telling me that, from what he had read and seen of Grecian Geography, he almost thought Clytemnestra’s famous Account of the Line of Signal Fires from Troy to Mycenæ to be possible (I mean you know in the Agamemnon). At least this is what I believe he said: I must not assert from a not very accurate Memory anything that would compromise a Greek Professor: I am so ignorant of Geography, ancient as well as modern, I don’t know exactly, or at all, the Points of the Beacons so enumerated: and Lempriere, the only Classic I have to refer to, doesn’t help me in what I want. Will you turn to the passage, and tell me what, and where, are:
1. The Μακίστου σκοπαί—
2. The Μεσαπίου φυλακες—
3. The ορος Αιyίπλαyκτον.
What, where, and why, so called? The rest I know, or can find in Dictionary, and Map. But for these—
Lempriere
Is no-where;
Liddell and Scott
Don’t help me a jot:
When I’m off, Donnegan
Don’t help me on again.—
So I’m obliged to resort to old Donne again!
Rhyme and Epigram quite worthy of the German.
To W. H. Thompson.
Fragment of a Letter written in Nov. 1862.
I took down a Juvenal to look for a Passage about the Loaded Waggon rolling through the Roman Streets. [34] I couldn’t find it. Do you know where it is? Not that you need answer this Question, which only comes in as if I were talking to you. I remember asking you whence Æschylus made his Agamemnon speak of Ulysses as unwilling at first to go on the Trojan Expedition. I see Paley refers it to some Poem called the Cypria quoted by Proclus. I was asking Donne the other Day as to some of the names of the Beacon-places in Clytemnestra’s famous Speech: and I then said I believed—but only believed, as an inaccurate Man, not wishing to
implicate others—that you, Thompson, had once told me that you thought the Chain of Fires might have passed from Troy to Mycenæ in the way described—just possibly might, I think—I assure you I took care not to commit your Credit by my uncertain Memory, whatever it was you said was only in a casual way over a Cigar. Are you for Ατης θυλλαι—Ατης θυλαι—ζωσι? [35a] a point I don’t care a straw about; so don’t answer this neither.
No, I didn’t go to the Exhibition: which, I know, looks like Affectation: but was honest Incuriosity and Indolence.
. . . On looking over Juvenal for the Lines I wanted I was amused at the prosaic Truth of one I didn’t want:
Intolerabilius nihil est quam femina dives. [35b]
To George Crabbe.
Dec. 20, 1862.
My dear George,
. . . I have been, and am, reading Borrow’s ‘Wild Wales,’ which I like well, because I can hear him talking it. But I don’t know if others will like it: anyhow there is too much of the same thing. Then what is meant for the plainest record of Conversation, etc., has such Phrases as ‘Marry
come up,’ etc., which mar the sense of Authenticity. Then, no one writing better English than Borrow in general, there is the vile Individual—Person—and Locality always cropping up: and even this vulgar Young Ladyism, ‘The Scenery was beautiful to a Degree.’ What Degree? When did this vile Phrase arise?
To W. H. Thompson.
Good Friday, 1863.
My dear Thompson,
Pray never feel ashamed of not answering my Letters so long as you do write twice a year, to let me know you live and thrive. As much oftener as you please: but you are only to be ashamed of not doing that. For that I really want of all who have been very kind and very constant (‘loyal’ is the word that even Emperors now use of themselves) for so many years. This I say in all sincerity.
Now, while you talk of being ashamed of not writing, I am rather ashamed of writing so much to you. Partly because I really have so little to say; and also because saying that little too often puts you to the shame you speak of. You say my Letters are pleasant, however: and they will be so far pleasant if they assure you that I like talking to you in that way: bad as I am at more direct communication. I can tell you your
letters are very pleasant to me; you at least have always something to tell of your half-year’s Life: and you tell it so wholesomely, I always say in so capital a Style, as makes me regret you have not written some of your better Knowledge for the Public. I suppose (as I have heard) that your Lectures [37] are excellent in this way; I can say I should like very much to attend a course of them, on the Greek Plays, or on Plato. I dare say you are right about an Apprenticeship in Red Tape being necessary to make a Man of Business: but is it too late in Life for you to buckle to and screw yourself up to condense some of your Lectures and scholarly Lore into a Book? By ‘too late in Life’ I mean too late to take Heart to do it.
I am sure you won’t believe that I am scratching you in return for any scratchings from your hands. We are both too old, too sensible, and too independent, I think, for that sort of thing.
As to my going to Ely in June, I don’t know yet what to say; for I have been Fool enough to order a Boat to be building which will cost me £350, and she talks of being launched in the very first week of June, and I have engaged for some short trips in her as soon as she is afloat. I begin to feel tired of her already; I felt I should when I was persuaded to order her: and that is the Folly of it. They say it is a very bad Thing
to do Nothing: but I am sure that is not the case with those who are born to Blunder; 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 it would have been worth his Life to have done those two; and I am always persuaded his Bacon would have been better if done more at a heat. I shall certainly buy the new Shakespeare you tell me of, if the Volumes aren’t bulky; which destroys my pleasure in the use of a Book.
I have had my share of Influenza: even this Woodbridge, with all its capital Air and self-contented Stupidity (which you know is very conducive to long Life) has been wheezing and coughing all the very mild winter; and the Bell of the Tower opposite my Room has been tolling oftener than I ever remember.
Though I can’t answer for June, I am really meditating a small trip to Wiltshire before June;
mainly to see the daughters of my old George Crabbe who are settled at Bradford on Avon, and want very much that I should see how happily they live on very small means indeed. And I must own I am the more tempted to go abroad because there is preparation for a Marriage in my Family (a Niece—but not one of my Norfolk Nieces) which is to be at my Brother’s near here; and there will be a Levée of People, who drop in here, etc. This may blow over, however.
Now I ought to be ashamed of this long Letter: don’t you make me so by answering it.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
To George Crabbe.
Woodbridge, June 8/63.
My dear George,
Your sister wrote me a very kind Letter to tell of her safe Return home. I must repeat to you very sincerely that I never recollect to have passed a pleasanter week. As far as Company went, it was like Old Times at Bredfield; and the Oak-trees were divine! I never expected to care so very much for Trees, nor for your flat Country: but I really feel as one who has bathed in Verdure. I suppose Town-living makes one alive to such a Change.
I spent a long Day with Thompson: [40] and much
liked the painted Roof. On Thursday I went to Lynn: which I took a Fancy to: the odd old Houses: the Quay: the really grand Inn (Duke’s Head, in the Market place) and the civil, Norfolk-talking, People. I went to Hunstanton, which is rather dreary: one could see the Country at Sandringham was good. I enquired fruitlessly about those Sandringham Pictures, etc.: even the Auctioneer, whom I found in the Bar of the Inn, could tell nothing of where they had gone.
To W. B. Donne.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
Sat. July 18/63.
My dear Donne,
. . . I can hardly tell you whether I am much pleased with my new Boat; for I hardly know myself. She is (as I doubted would be from the first) rather awkward in our narrow River; but then she was to be a good Sea-boat; and I don’t know but she is; and will be better in all ways when we have got her in proper trim. Yesterday we gave her what they call ‘a tuning’ in a rather heavy swell round Orford Ness: and she did well without a reef, etc. But, now all is got, I don’t any the more want to go far away by Sea, any more than by Land; having no Curiosity left for other Places, and glad to get back to my own Chair and Bed after three or four Days’ Absence. So long as I get
on the Sea from time to time, it is much the same to me whether off Aldbro’ or Penzance. And I find I can’t sleep so well on board as I used to do thirty years ago: and not to get one’s Sleep, you know, indisposes one more or less for the Day. However, we talk of Dover, Folkestone, Holland, etc., which will give one’s sleeping Talents a tuning.
To George Crabbe.
Woodbridge, July 19, [1863].
My dear George,
You tell me the Romney is at Gardner’s: but where is Gardner’s? And what was the Price of the Portrait? Laurence said well about Romney that, as compared to Sir Joshua and Gainsboro’, his Pictures looked tinted, rather than painted; the colour of the Cheek (for instance) rather superficially laid on, as rouge, rather than ingrained, and mantling like Blood from below. Laurence had seen those at last year’s Exhibition: I have not seen near so many. I remember one that seemed to me capital at Lord Bute’s in Bedfordshire.
I came home yesterday from a short Cruise to Yarmouth, etc., where some people were interested in the Channel Fleet. But I could take no interest in Steam Ships and Iron Rams.
My dear George,
I have at last done my Holland: you won’t be surprised to hear that I did it in two days, and was too glad to rush home on the first pretence, after (as usual) seeing nothing I cared the least about. The Country itself I had seen long before in Dutch Pictures, and between Beccles and Norwich: the Towns I had seen in Picturesque Annuals, Drop Scenes, etc.
But the Pictures—the Pictures—themselves?
Well, you know how I am sure to mismanage: but you will hardly believe, even of me, that I never saw what was most worth seeing, the Hague Gallery! But so it was: had I been by myself, I should have gone off directly (after landing at Rotterdam) to that: but Mr. Manby was with me: and he thought best to see about Rotterdam first: which was last Thursday, at whose earliest Dawn we arrived. So we tore about in an open Cab: saw nothing: the Gallery not worth a visit: and at night I was half dead with weariness. Then again on Friday I, by myself, should have started for the Hague: but as Amsterdam was also to be done, we thought best to go there (as furthest) first. So we went: tore about the town in a Cab as before: and I raced through the Museum seeing (I must say) little better than what I have seen over and over again in England. I couldn’t
admire the Night-watch much: Van der Helst’s very good Picture seemed to me to have been cleaned: I thought the Rembrandt Burgomasters worth all the rest put together. But I certainly looked very flimsily at all.
Well, all this done, away we went to the Hague: arriving there just as the Museum closed for that day; next Day (Saturday) it was not to be open at all (I having proposed to wait in case it should), and on Sunday only from 12 to 2. Hearing all this, in Rage and Despair I tore back to Rotterdam: and on Saturday Morning got the Boat out of the muddy Canal in which she lay and tore back down the Maas, etc., so as to reach dear old Bawdsey shortly after Sunday’s Sunrise. Oh, my Delight when I heard them call out ‘Orford Lights!’ as the Boat was plunging over the Swell.
All this is very stupid, really wrong: but you are not surprised at it in me. One reason however of my Disgust was, that we (in our Boat) were shut up (as I said) in the Canal, where I couldn’t breathe. I begged Mr. Manby to let me take him to an Inn: he would stick to his Ship, he said: and I didn’t like to leave him. Then it was Murray who misled me about the Hague Gallery: he knew nothing about its being shut on Saturdays. Then again we neither of us knew a word of Dutch: and I was surprised how little was known of English in return.
But I shall say no more. I think it is the last foreign Travel I shall ever undertake; unless I should
go with you to see the Dresden Madonna: to which there is one less impediment now Holland is not to be gone through. . . . I am the Colour of a Lobster with Sea-faring: and my Eyes smart: so Good-Bye. Let me hear of you. Ever yours E. F. G.
Oh dear!—Rembrandt’s Dissection—where and how did I miss that?
To E. B. Cowell.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
Aug. 5/63.
My dear Cowell,
I don’t hear from you: I rather think you are deterred by those Birds which I asked you to print (in my last Letter) with some Correction, etc., of your own: and which you have not found Time or Inclination to get done. But don’t let anything of this sort prevent your writing to me now and then: no one can be more utterly indifferent than I am whether these Birds are printed or not: and I suppose I distinctly told you not to put yourself to any Trouble. Indeed I dare say I should only be bored with the Copies when they were printed: for I don’t know a Soul here who would care for the Thing if it were ten times as well done as I have done it: nor do I care for Translation or Original, myself. Oh dear, when I do look into Homer, Dante, and Virgil, Æschylus, Shakespeare, etc., those Orientals
look—silly! Don’t resent my saying so. 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!
I am just returned in my Ship from Holland—where I stayed—two days!—and was so glad to rush away home after being imprisoned in a sluggish un-sweet Canal in Rotterdam: and after tearing about to Amsterdam, the Hague, etc., to see things which were neither new nor remarkable to me though I had never seen them before—except in Pictures, which represent to you the Places as well as if you went there, without the trouble of going. I am sure wiser men, with keener outsight and insight would see what no Pictures could give: but this I know is always the case with me: this is my last Voyage abroad, I believe: unless I go to see Raffaelle’s Madonna at Dresden, which no other Picture can represent than itself: unless Dante’s Beatrice.
I don’t think you ever told me if you had got, or read, Spedding’s two first volumes of Bacon. My opinion is not the least altered of the Case: and (as I anticipated) Spedding has brooded over his Egg so
long he has rather addled it. Thompson told me that the very Papers he adduces to clear Bacon in Essex’s Business, rather go against him: I haven’t seen any Notice of the Book in any Review but Fraser: where Donne (of course) was convinced, etc., and I hear that even the wise old Spedding is mortified that he has awakened so little Interest for his Hero. You know his Mortification would not be on his own score. His last Letter to me (some months ago) seemed to indicate that he could scarce lift up his Pen to go on—he had as yet, he said, written nothing of volumes 3 and 4. But I suppose he will in time. I say this Life of his wasted on a vain work is a Tragedy pathetic as Antigone or Iphigenia. Of Tennyson I hear but little: and I have ceased to look forward to any future Work of his. Thackeray seems dumb as a gorged Blackbird too: all growing old!
I have lost my sister Kerrich, the only one of my family I much cared for, or who much cared for me.
But (not to dwell on what cannot be helped, and to which my talking of all growing old led me) I see in last week’s Athenæum great Praise of a new Volume of Poems by Jean Ingelow. The Reviewer talks of a ‘new Poet,’ etc., quite unaware that some dozen years ago the ‘new Poet’ published a Volume (as you may remember) with as distinct Indications of sweet, fresh, and original Genius as anything he adduces from this second Volume. I remember writing a sort of Review, when about you at Bramford,
which I sent to Mitford, to try and give the Book a little move: but Mitford had just quitted the Gentleman’s Magazine, and I tore up my Paper. Your Elizabeth knows (I think) all about this Lady: who, I suppose, is connected with Lincolnshire: for the Reviewer speaks of some of the Poems as relating to that Coast—Shipwrecks, etc. I was told that Tennyson was writing a sort of Lincolnshire Idyll: I will bet on Miss Ingelow now: he should never have left his old County, and gone up to be suffocated by London Adulation. He has lost that which caused the long roll of the Lincolnshire Wave to reverberate in the measure of Locksley Hall. Don’t believe that I rejoice like a Dastard in what I believe to be the Decay of a Great Man: my sorrow has been so much about it that (for one reason) I have the less cared to meet him of late years, having nothing to say in sincere praise. Nor do I mean that his Decay is all owing to London, etc. He is growing old: and I don’t believe much in the Fine Arts thriving on an old Tree: I can’t think Milton’s Paradise Lost so good as his Allegro, etc.; one feels the strain of the Pump all through: only Shakespeare—the exception to all rule—struck out Macbeth at past fifty. [47a]
By the way, there is a new—and the best—edition [47b] of Him coming out: edited by two men (Fellows) of Cambridge. Just the Text, with the various readings of Folio and Quartos: scarce any notes: but suggestions of Alteration from Pope, Theobald, Coleridge,
etc., and—Spedding; who (as I told him twenty years ago) should have done the work these men are doing. He also says they are well doing about half what is wanted to be done. He should—for he could—have done all; and one Frontispiece Portrait would have served for Author and Editor.
Come—here is a long Letter—and (as I read it over) with more Go than usually attends my old Pen now. Let it inspire you to answer: never mind the Birds:—which really suggests to me one of Dante’s beautiful lines which made me cry the other Day at Sea.
Mentre che gli occhi per la fronda verde
Ficcava io così, come far suole
Chi dietro all’ uccellin la vita perde,
Lo più che Padre mi dicea, etc. [48a]
To W. B. Donne.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
October 4/63.
My dear Donne,
Very rude of me not to have acknowledged your Tauchnitz [48b] before: but I have been almost living in my Ship ever since: and I supposed also that you were abroad in Norfolk. I pitied you undergoing those dreadful Oratorios: I never heard one that was not tiresome, and in part ludicrous. Such subjects are scarce fitted for Catgut. Even Magnus Handel—even
Messiah. He (Handel) was a good old Pagan at heart, and (till he had to yield to the fashionable Piety of England) stuck to Opera, and Cantatas, such as Acis and Galatea, Milton’s Penseroso, Alexander’s Feast, etc., where he could revel and plunge and frolic without being tied down to Orthodoxy. And these are (to my mind) his really great works: these, and his Coronation Anthems, where Human Pomp is to be accompanied and illustrated
Now for Tauchnitz; somehow, that which you sent me is not the thing: I don’t like it half so well as my little Tauchnitz stereotype Sophocles of 1827. The Euripides you send bears date 1846: and is certainly not so clear to my eyes as 1827. Never mind: don’t trouble yourself further: I shall light upon what I want one of these Days. 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; one the Michel Angelo, and ’tother the Raffaelle, of Tragedy. As to the famous Prometheus, I think, as I always thought, it is somewhat
over-rated for Sublimity; I can’t see much in the far famed Conception of the Hero’s Character: and I doubt (rest wanting).
To S. Laurence.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Jan. 7/64.
Dear Laurence,
. . . I want to know about your two Portraits of Thackeray: the first one (which I think Smith and Elder have) I know by the Print: I want to know about one you last did (some two years ago?) whether you think it as good and characteristic: and also who has it. Frederic Tennyson sent me a Photograph of W. M. T. old, white, massive, and melancholy, sitting in his Library.
I am surprized 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 in 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, etc., thirty years ago. [50]
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Jan. 12/64.
My dear George,
. . . Have we exchanged a word about Thackeray since his Death? I am quite surprised to see how I sit moping about him: to be sure, I keep reading his Books. Oh, the Newcomes are fine! And now I have got hold of Pendennis, and seem to like that much more than when I first read it. I keep hearing him say so much of it; and really think I shall hear his Step up the Stairs to this Lodging as in old Charlotte Street thirty years ago. Really, a great Figure has sunk under Earth.
To W. H. Thompson.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Jan. 23/64.
My dear Thompson,
You see I return with your other troubles of Term time. Only when you have ten spare minutes let me know how you are, etc. . . . I have almost wondered at myself how much occupied I have been thinking of Thackeray; so little as I had seen of him for the last ten years, and my Interest in him a little gone from hearing he had become somewhat spoiled: which also some of his later writings hinted to me of
themselves. But his Letters, and former works, bring me back the old Thackeray. . . . I had never read Pendennis and the Newcomes since their first appearance till this last month. They are wonderful; Fielding’s seems to me coarse work in comparison. I have indeed been thinking of little this last month but of these Books and their Author. Of his Letters to me I have only kept some Dozen, just to mark the different Epochs of our Acquaintance.
To E. B. Cowell.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Jan. 31/64.
My dear Cowell,
I have only Today got your Letter: have been walking out by myself in the Seckford Almshouse Garden till 9 p.m. in a sharp Frost—with Orion stalking over the South before me—(do you know him in India? I forget) have come in—drunk a glass of Porter; and am minded to answer you before I get to Bed. Perhaps the Porter will leave me stranded, however, before I get to the End of my Letter.
Before this reaches you—probably before I write it—you will have heard of Thackeray’s sudden Death. It was told me as I was walking alone in those same Seckford Gardens on Christmas-day Night; by a Corn-merchant—one George Manby—(do you remember him?) who came on purpose to tell me—and to wish me in other respects a Happy Christmas.
I have thought little else than of W. M. T. ever since—what with reading over his Books, and the few Letters I had kept of his; and thinking over our five and thirty years’ Acquaintance as I sit alone by my Fire these long Nights. I had seen very little of him for these last ten years; nothing for the last five; he did not care to write; and people told me he was become a little spoiled: by London praise, and some consequent Egotism. But he was a very fine Fellow. His Books are wonderful: Pendennis; Vanity Fair; and the Newcomes; to which compared Fielding’s seems to me coarse work. I don’t know yet how his two daughters are left provided for; the Papers say well. He had built and furnished a fine House at 7 or 8000 £ cost; which is as good a Property for them to let or sell as any other, I suppose; and the Copyright of his Books must also be a good Property: always supposing he had not encumbered all these by anticipation.
I was not at all well myself for three months; but either the Doctor’s Stuff, or the sharp clear weather, or both, have set me up pretty much as I was before. I have nothing to tell, as usual, of People or Places; for I have scarce stirred from this Place since my little Ship was laid up in the middle of October. Donne writes sometimes; I see an article of his about the Antonines advertised in the present Edinburgh; but that you know is out of my Line. His second son, Mowbray, is lately married to a Daughter (I don’t know which) of Mrs. Salmon’s; widow of
a former Rector here, whom your Elizabeth will remember all about, I dare say.
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 dare say you are quite right about my ‘Birds’: indeed I think I had always told you that my Version was of no public use; I only wanted a few Copies for private use; and I wanted you to add a short Account, and a few Notes; in which I am shy of trusting my own Irish Accuracy. But you have plenty of better work, and this is quite as well left.
Miss Ingelow’s second volume isn’t half so good as her first, to my thinking; more ambitious, with a twang of Tennyson. I can’t add to the List you have sent of Elizabeth’s Poems.
Maria C[harlesworth] was staying with my Brother at Boulge in the Autumn, and sent a very kind message to me; I now am sorry I did not see her; but I keep out of the way of the Company at Boulge, though I am glad to see my Brother here. So I wish I had asked her to take the Trouble to come
and see me in my Den. Alas! if ever you do come back, you will have to come and see me; for I really go nowhere now. Frederic Tennyson came to me for a few Days, and talked of you two: he was looking very well; and was grand and kind as before. I hear little of Alfred. Spedding’s Bacon seems to hang fire; they say he is disheartened at the little Interest, and less Conviction, that his two first volumes carried; Thompson told me they had only convinced him the other way; and that Ellis had long given up Bacon’s Defence before he died.
Now my sheet is filled on the strength of my own Glass of Porter—all at a heat. So Good Bye: ever yours, E. F. G.
To S. Laurence.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
April 23/64.
Dear Laurence,
I only got home last Night, from Wiltshire, where I had been to see Miss Crabbe, daughter of the old Vicar whom you remember. I found your two Letters: and then your Box. When I had unscrewed the last Screw, it was as if a Coffin’s Lid were raised; there was the Dead Man. [55] I took him up to my Bedroom; and when morning came, he was there—reading; alive, and yet dead. I am perfectly satisfied with it on the whole; indeed, could only have suggested a very, very, slight alteration, if any. . .
As I passed through London, I saw that wonderful Collection of Rubbish, the late Bishop of Ely’s Pictures; but I fell desperately in Love with a Sir Joshua, a young Lady in white with a blue Sash, and a sweet blue Sky over her sweet, noble, Head; far above Gainsboro’ in its Air and Expression. I see in the Papers that it went for £165; which, if I thought well to give so much for any Picture, I could almost have given, by some means, for such a delightful Work.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
April 27/64.
Dear Laurence,
. . . I will send back the Gainsboro’ copy [56a] at once; I think the Original must be one of the happiest of the Painter’s; while he had Vandyke in his Eye, with whom he was to go to Heaven. [56b] I will not argue how far he was superior to Reynolds in Colour; but in the Air of Dignity and Gentility (in the better Sense) he was surely inferior; it must be so, from the Difference of Character in the two men. Madame D’Arblay (Miss Burney) relates how one day when she was dining with Sir Joshua at Richmond, she chanced to see him looking at her in a peculiar way; she said to him, ‘I know what you are thinking about.’ ‘Ay,’ he said, ‘you may come and sit to me now whenever you please.’ They had often met; but he at last caught the
phase of her which was best; but I don’t think it ever went to Canvas. I don’t think Gainsboro’ could have painted the lovely portrait at the Bishop of Ely’s, slight as it was; Sir Joshua was by much the finer Gentleman; indeed Gainsboro’ was a Scamp.
* * * * *
In the summer of 1864 FitzGerald bought a small farmhouse in the outskirts of Woodbridge, which he afterwards converted into Little Grange.
To George Crabbe.
Woodbridge: July 31/64.
My dear George,
I returned yesterday from a Ten Days’ Cruise to the Sussex Coast: which was pleasant enough. To-morrow I talk of Lowestoft and Yarmouth.
. . . Read Newman’s Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ, something of a very different order [from the ‘Dean’s English’], deeply interesting; pathetic, eloquent, and, I think, sincere: sincere, in not being conscious of all the steps he took in reaching his present Place.
To E. B. Cowell.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Aug. 31, [1864].
My dear Cowell,
. . . I hope you don’t think I have forgotten you. Your visit gave me a sad sort of Pleasure, dashed with the Memory of other Days; I now
see so few People, and those all of the common sort, with whom I never talk of our old Subjects; so I get in some measure unfitted for such converse, and am almost saddened with the remembrance of an old contrast when it comes. And there is something besides; a Shadow of Death: but I won’t talk of such things: only believe I don’t forget you, nor wish to be forgotten by you. Indeed, your kindness touched me.
I have been reading Juvenal with Translation, etc., in my Boat. Nearly the best things seem to me what one may call Epistles, rather than Satires: viii. To Ponticus: xi. To Persicus: and xii. xiii. and xiv to several others: and, in these, leaving out the directly satirical Parts. Satires iii and x, like Horace’s Poems, are prostituted by Parliamentary and vulgar use, and should lie by for a while. One sees Lucretius, I think, in many parts; but Juvenal can’t rise to Lucretius, who is, after all, the true sublime Satirist of poor Man, and of something deeper than his Corruptions and Vices: and he looks on all, too, with ‘a Countenance more in Sorrow than in Anger.’ By the way, I want you to tell me the name and Title of that Essay on Lucretius [58] which you said was enlarged and reprinted by the Author from the original Cambridge and Oxford Essays. I want much to get it.
There is a fine Passage in Juvenal’s 6th Satire on Women: beginning line 634, ‘Fingimus hæc, etc.’ to 650: but (as I think) leaving out lines 639, 640; because one can understand without them, and they jingle sadly with their one vowel ending. I mention this because it occurs in a Satire which, from its Subject, you may perhaps have little cared for.
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. Ever yours E. F. G.
‘Sed genus humanum damnat caligo Futuri’—a Lucretian line from Juvenal. [59b]
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Nov. 11/64.
My dear Cowell,
Let me hear of you whenever you have something to tell of yourself: or indeed whenever you
have a few spare minutes, and happen, to think—of me. I don’t forget you: and ‘out of sight’ is not ‘out of mind’ with you, and three or four more in the World. I hope you see Donne at times: and you must look out for old Spedding, that melancholy Ruin of the 19th Century, with his half-white-washed Bacon. Perhaps you will see another Ruin—the Author of Enoch Arden. Compare that with the Spontaneous Go of Palace of Art, Mort d’Arthur, Gardener’s Daughter, Locksley Hall, Will Waterproof, Sleeping Palace, Talking Oak, and indeed, one may say, all the two volumes of 1842. As to Maud, I think it the best Poem, as a whole, after 1842.
To come down to very little, from once great, Things—I don’t know if it’s your coming home, or my being better this Winter, or what: but I have caught up a long ago begun Version of my dear old Mágico, and have so recast it that scarce a Plank remains of the original! Pretty impudence: and yet all done to conciliate English, or modern, Sympathy. This I sha’n’t publish: so say (pray!) nothing of it at all—remember—only I shall print some Copies for you and one or two more: and you and Elizabeth will like it a great deal too much. There is really very great Skill in the Adaptation, and Remodelling of it. By the bye, would you translate Demonio, Lucifer, or Satan? One of the two I take. I cut out all the precioso very ingeniously: and give all the Mountain-moving,
etc., in the second Act without Stage direction, so as it may seem to pass only in the dazzled Eyes, or Fantasy, of Cyprian. All this is really a very difficult Job to me; not worth the Candle, I dare say: only that you two will be pleased. I also increase the religious Element in the Drama; and make Cyprian outwit the Devil more cleverly than he now does; for the Devil was certainly too clever to be caught in his own Art. That was very good Fun for an Autodafé Audience, however.
But please say nothing of this to any one. I should like to take up the Vida es Sueño too in the same manner; but these plays are more difficult than all the others put together: and I have no spur now.
How would you translate Pliny’s ‘Quisquis est Deus, et quacumque in parte, totus est Sensûs, totus Visûs, totus Auditûs, totus Animæ, totus Animi, totus Sui?’ [61]
This Passage is alluded to by Calderon; but, in the manner of our old Playwrights, I quote it in the Latin and translate. I want to know by you if I have done it sufficiently; and I don’t send you mine, in order that you may send me your Version freely.
Now, Good Bye: I suppose it’s this rainy Day that draws out this, with several other Letters, that had waited some while to be written.
Yours ever E. F. G.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
February 25/65.
My dear Lord,
Edward Cowell’s return to England [62a] set him and me talking of old Studies together, left off since he went to India. And I took up three sketched out Dramas, two of Calderon, [62b] and have licked the two Calderons into some sort of shape of my own, without referring to the Original. One of them goes by this Post to your Grace; and when I tell you the other is no other than your own ‘Life’s a Dream,’ you won’t wonder at my sending the present one on Trial, both done as they are in the same lawless, perhaps impudent, way. I know you would not care who did these things, so long as they were well done; but one doesn’t wish to meddle, and in so free-and-easy a way, with a Great Man’s Masterpieces, and utterly fail: especially when two much better men have been before one. One excuse is, that Shelley and Dr. Trench only took parts of these plays, not caring surely—who can?—for the underplot and buffoonery which stands most in the way of the tragic Dramas. Yet I think it is as a whole, that is, the whole main Story, that these Plays are capital; and therefore I have tried to present that whole, leaving out the rest, or nearly so; and altogether the
Thing has become so altered one way or another that I am afraid of it now it’s done, and only send you one Play (the other indeed is not done printing: neither to be published), which will be enough if it is an absurd Attempt. For the Vida is not so good even, I doubt: dealing more in the Heroics, etc.
I tell Donne he is too partial a Friend; so is Cowell: Spedding, I think, wouldn’t care. So, as you were very kind about the other Plays, and love Calderon (which I doubt argues against me), I send you my Magician.
You will not mind if I blunder in addressing you; in which I steered a middle course between the modes Donne told me; and so, probably, come to the Ground!
To John Allen.
Market hill: Ipswich. [63]
April 10/65.
My dear Allen,
I was much obliged to you for your former Letters; and now send you the second Play. This I don’t suppose you’ll like as well as the first: perhaps not at all; it is rather ‘Ercles vein’ I doubt. I wish to know however from you what you do think of it; because if it seem to you at all preposterous, I shall not send it to some others: but leave them with the first, which really does
please those I wished it to please, with its fine Story and Moral. If you like what I now send, I will send you a Copy of Both stitched together, and another copy to your Cousin: and indeed to any one else you think might be pleased with it.
I am indulging in the expensive amusement of Building, though not on a very large scale. It is very pleasant, certainly, to see one’s little Gables and Chimnies mount into Air and occupy a Place in the Landscape.
There is a duller Memoir than the ‘Lady of Quality,’ Miss Lucy Aitken’s Letters, etc. You will find the Private Life of an Eastern Queen a good little Book. I have now got Carlyle’s two last volumes of Frederick: of which I have only read the latter Part; I don’t know whether I can read through the Wars and Battles, which are said to be very fine.
The piece of Literature I really could benefit Posterity with, I do believe, is an edition of that wonderful and aggravating Clarissa Harlowe; and this I would effect with a pair of Scissors only. It would not be a bit too long as it is, if it were all equally good; but pedantry comes in, and might, I think, be cleared away, leaving the remainder one of the great, original, Works of the World! in this Line. Lovelace is the wonderful character, for Wit: and there is some grand Tragedy too. And nobody reads it! Ever yours,
E. F. G.
[1865].
My dear Lady,
I answer you thus directly because I would stick in a Bit of a Letter from Thompson of Cambridge: which relates to a question I asked him weeks ago, as I told E. B. C. I would.
You must not think I was in a hurry to have my Play praised: I was really fearful of its being bombastic. You are so enthusiastic in your old and kind Regards and Memories that I can scarce rely on you for a cool Judgment in the matter. But I gather from E. B. C. that he was not struck with what I doubted: and I am very glad, at any rate, that you are very well pleased, both of you.
E. B. C. is quite right about obscurity of Phrase: which is inexcusable unless where the Passion of the Speakers makes such utterance natural. This is very often not the case in the Plays, I know: and the Language, as he says, becomes obscure from elaborate Brevity.
What you tell of the Music in the Air at your Father’s Death—Oh, how Frederic Tennyson would open all his Eyes at this! For he lives in a World of Spirits—Swedenborg’s World, which you would not approve; which I cannot sympathize with: but yet I admire the Titanic old Soul so resolutely blind to the Philosophy of the Day.
Oh, I think England would be much better for E. B. C. and you: but I can’t say anything against what he thinks the Duty chalked out for him. I don’t believe the English Rule will hold in India: but, meanwhile, a good Man may think he must do what Good he can there, come what may of it. There is also Good to be done in England!
The Wind is still very ‘stingy’ though the Sun shines, and though it blows from the West. So we are all better at our homes for the present.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
To W. B. Donne.
Ramsgate: August 27, [1865].
My dear Donne,
Your letter found me here, where I have been a week cruising about with my old Brother Peter. To morrow we leave—for Calais, as we propose; just to touch French Soil, and drink a Bottle of French Wine in the old Town: then home again to Woodbridge as fast as we may. For thither goes William Airy, partly in hopes of meeting me: he says he is much shaken by the dangerous illness he had this last Spring: and thinks, truly enough, that our chances of meeting in this World sensibly diminish.
You must not talk of my kindness to you at
Lowestoft: when all the good is on your side, going out of your way to see me. Really it makes me ashamed.
Together with your Letter, I found a very kind one from Mrs. Kemble, who took the trouble to write only to tell me how well she liked the Plays. I know that Good Nature would not affect her Judgment (which I very honestly think too favourable), but it was Good Nature made her write to tell me.
Don’t forget to sound Murray at some good opportunity about a Selection from Crabbe. Of course he won’t let me do it, though I could do it better than any he would be likely to employ: for you know I rely on my Appreciation of what others do, not on what I can do myself.
The ‘Parcel’ you write of has not been sent me here: but I shall find it when I return, and will write to you again. I puzzle my Brains to remember what the ‘Conscript’ is.
I have been reading, and reducing to one volume from two (more meo), a trashy Book, ‘Bernard’s Recollections of the Stage,’ with some good recollections of the Old Actors, up to Macklin and Garrick. But, of all people’s, one can’t trust Actors’ Stories. In ‘Lethe,’ where your Garrick figures in Sir Geoffrey, also figured Woodward, as ‘The Fine Gentleman’; so I think, at least, is the Title of a very capital mezzotint I have of him in Character,
Oh! famous is your Story of Lord Chatham and the Bishops; [68] be sure you set it afloat again in print.
You don’t tell me if Trench be recovered: but I shall conclude from your Silence that, at any rate, he is not now seriously ill.
Now I hear my good Brother come in from Morning Mass, and we shall have Breakfast. He is really capital to sail about with. I read your letter yesterday while sitting out on a Bench with her—his Wife—a brave Woman, of the O’Dowd sort; and she wanted to know all about you and yours. We like Ramsgate very much: genial air: pleasant Country: good Harbour, Piers, etc.: and the Company, though overflowing, not showy, nor vulgar: but seemingly come to make the most of a Holiday. I am surprized how little of the Cockney, in its worse aspect, is to be seen.
To E. B. Cowell.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Septr. 5/65.
My dear Cowell,
Let me hear of you: I don’t forget, though I don’t see, you. Nor am I so wrapt up in my Ship as not to have many a day on which I should be very glad
to dispense with her and have you over here: but I can’t well make sure what day: sometimes I ask one man to go, sometimes another, and so all is cut up. Besides I was away six weeks in all at Lowestoft; then a fortnight at Ramsgate, Dover, Calais, etc. When the apple ερευθεται ακρω επ οσδω [69a]—then my Ship will be laid up, and one more Summer of mine departed, and then I hope you will come over to talk over many things.
Read Lady Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt: which you won’t like, because of some latitude in Religious thought, and also because of some vulgar slang, such as Schoolboys, and American Women use, and it is now the bad fashion for even English Ladies to adopt. But the Book is worth reading notwithstanding this, and making allowance for a Lady or Gentleman seeing all rose-colour in a new Pet or Plaything. On sending the Book back to the Library this morning I quote out of it something about Oriental Poetry which you may know well enough but I was not so conscious of. In a Love-song where the Lover declines a Physician for the wound which the Wind (Love) has caused, he says ‘For only he who has hurt can cure me.’ ‘N.B. The masculine pronoun is always used instead of the feminine in Poetry, out of decorum: sometimes even in conversation.’ [69b] (It being as forbidden to talk of women as to see them, etc.)
I was very pleased with Calais, which remains the ‘vieille France’ of my Childhood.
Donne came to see me for a Day at Lowestoft, the same ‘vieil Donne’ also of my Boyhood.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
To John Allen.
Markethill: Woodbridge.
Nov. 1/65.
My dear Allen,
Let me hear how you and yours are: it is now a long [time] since we exchanged Letters. G. Crabbe wrote me you were corresponding with a very different person: the Editor of the Times. I never see that nor any other Paper but the good old Athenæum. G. Crabbe also said you were at the Norwich Congress. Then why didn’t you come here? He said the Bishop of Oxford, whom he had never met before, met him at Lord Walsingham’s, and shook him so cordially by the hand, and pressed him so for a visit to Oxford, that he (G. C.) rather thought he (Sam) deserved the Epithet usually added to his Name. Perhaps, however, the Bishop did feel for a Grandson of the Poet.
I have no more to tell you of myself this past Summer than for so many Summers past. Only sailing about, Lowestoft, Ramsgate, Dover, Calais, etc. I was very pleased indeed with Calais; just
as I remember it forty years ago except for the Soldiers’ Uniform.
Duncan wrote me not a very cheerful Letter some while ago: he was unwell, of Cold and rheumatism, I think. Of other Friends I know nothing: but am going to write my annual Letters to them. What a State of things to come to! How one used to wonder, hearing our predecessors talk in that way, something! But I don’t think our successors wonder if we talk so; for they seem to begin Life with indifference, instead of ending it.
My house is not yet finished: two rooms have taken about five months: which is not slow for Woodbridge. To day I have been catching Cold in looking at some Trees planted—‘factura Nepotibus umbram.’
Now this precious Letter can’t go to-night for want of Envelope; and in half an hour two Merchants are coming to eat Oysters and drink Burton ale. I would rather be alone, and smoke my own pipe in peace over one of Trollope’s delightful Novels, ‘Can you forgive her?’
Now, my dear Allen, here is enough of me, for your sake as well as mine. But let me hear something from you. All good Remembrances to the Wife and those of your Children who remember yours ever, E. F. G.
My dear Allen,
I enclose you two prints which may amuse you to look at and keep.
I have a wonderful Museum of such scraps of Portrait; about once a year a Man sends me a Portfolio of such things. But my chief Article is Murderers; and I am now having a Newgate Calendar from London. I don’t ever wish to see and hear these things tried; but, when they are in print, I like to sit in Court then, and see the Judges, Counsel, Prisoners, Crowd: hear the Lawyers’ Objections, the Murmur in the Court, etc.
The Charge is prepared; the Lawyers are met,
The Judges are rang’d, a terrible show.
De Soyres came here the other Day, and we were talking of you; he said you had invited Newman to your house. A brave thing, if you did. I think his Apology very noble; and himself quite honest, so far as he can see himself. The Passage in No. 7 of the Apology where he describes the State of the World as wholly irreflective of its Creator unless you turn—to Popery—is very grand.
Now I probably sha’n’t write to you again before Christmas: so let me wish you and Mrs. Allen and your Family a Happy time of it.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
I was very disappointed in Miss Berry’s Correspondence; one sees a Woman of Sense, Taste, Good Breeding, and I suppose, Good Looks; but what more, to make three great Volumes of! Compare her with Trench’s Mother. And with all her perpetual travels to improve health and spirits (which lasted perfectly well to near ninety) one would have been more interested if there were one single intimation of caring about any Body but herself, helping one poor Person, etc.
I don’t know if she or Mrs. Delany is dullest.
To W. H. Thompson.
Woodbridge: March 15/66.
My dear Thompson,
To-day’s Post brings me a Letter from Robert Groome, which tells me (on ‘Times’ authority) that you are Master of Trinity. Judging by your last Letter, I suppose this was unexpected by yourself: I have no means of knowing whether it was expected by others beside those who voted you to the Honour. For I had heard nothing further of the whole matter, even of Whewell’s accident, than you yourself told me. Well, at our time of Life, any very vehement Congratulations are, I suppose, irrelevant on both sides. But I am very sure I do congratulate you heartily, if you are yourself gratified. Whether you are glad of the Post itself or not, you must, I think, be gratified with the Confidence in your Scholarship
and Character which has made your Society elect you. And so far one may unreservedly congratulate you. . . .
To-day I was looking at the Carpenters, etc., carrying away Chips, etc., of a Tree I had cut down: and, coming home, read—
δρυος πεσουσης πας ανηρ ξυλευεται [74]—
Whose Line?—Certainly not of
Yours ever sincerely, E. F. G.
To John Allen.
Market hill: Woodbridge,
March 19 [1866].
My dear Allen,
You shall hear a very little about me; and you shall tell me a very little about yourself? I forget when I last wrote to you, or heard from you: I suppose, about the end of Autumn. Here have I been ever since, without stirring further than Ipswich: and seeing nobody you know except R. Groome once. He wrote me the other day to announce that Thompson was Master of Trinity; an Honour quite unexpected by Thompson himself, I conclude, seeing that he himself had written to me only a Fortnight before, telling me of Whewell’s Disaster, and sincerely hoping for his Recovery, from a Dread of a new King
Log or King Stork, he said. He also said something of coming here at Easter: which now, I suppose, he won’t be able to do. I have written to congratulate him in a sober way on his Honours; for, at our Time of Life, I think exultation would be unseasonable on either side. He will make a magnanimous Master, I believe; doing all the Honours of his Station well, if he have health.
Spedding wrote me a kind long Letter some while ago. Duncan tells me Cameron has had a slight Paralysis. Death seems to rise like a Wall against one now whichever way one looks. When I read Boswell and other Memoirs now, what presses on me most is—All these people who talked and acted so busily are gone. It is said that when Talma advanced upon the Stage his Thought on facing the Audience was, that they were all soon to be Nothing.
I bought Croker’s Boswell; which I find good to refer to, but not to read; so hashed up it is with interpolations. Besides, one feels somehow that a bad Fellow like Croker mars the Good Company he introduces. One should stop with Malone, who was a good Gentleman: only rather too loyal to Johnson, and so unjust to any who dared hint a fault in him. Yet they were right. Madame D’Arblay, who was also so vext with Mrs. Piozzi, admits that she had a hard time with Johnson in his last two years; so irritable and violent he became that she says People would not ask him when they invited all the rest of the Party.
Why, my Paper is done, talking about these dead and gone whom you and I have only known in Print; and yet as well so as most we know in person. I really find my Society in such Books; all the People seem humming about me. But now let me hear of you, Allen: and of Wife and Family.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
To W. H. Thompson.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
[March, 1866.]
My dear Thompson,
I should write ‘My dear Master’ but I don’t know if you are yet installed. However, I suppose my Letter, so addressed, will find you and not the Old Lion now stalking in the Shades. . . .
In burning up a heap of old Letters, which one’s Executors and Heirs would make little of, I came upon several of Morton’s from Italy: so good in Parts that I have copied those Parts into a Blank Book. When he was in his money Troubles I did the same from many other of his Letters, and Thackeray asked Blackwood to give ten pounds for them for his Magazine. But we heard no more of them.
I have the usual Story to tell of myself: middling well: still here, pottering about my House, in which I expect an invalid Niece; and preparing for my Ship
in June. William Airy talks of coming to me soon. I am daily expecting the Death of a Sister in law, a right good Creature, who I thought would outlive me a dozen years, and should rejoice if she could. Things look serious about one. If one only could escape easily and at once! For I think the Fun is over: but that should not be. May you flourish in your high Place, my dear Master (now I say) for this long while.
[June, 1866.]
My dear Thompson,
I won’t say that I should have gone to Ely under any Circumstances, though it is the last Place I have been to stay at with a Friend: three years ago! And all my Stays there were very pleasant indeed: and I do not the less thank you for all your Constancy and Kindness. But one is got down yet deeper in one’s Way of Life: of which enough has been said.
William Airy was to have come here about this time: and him I am obliged to put off because another old Fellow Collegian, Duncan, [77] who has scarce stirred from his Dorsetshire Parsonage these twenty years, was seized with a Passion to see me just once more, he says: and he is now with me: a Hypochondriack Man, nervous, and restless, with a vast deal of uncouth Humour. . . .
My Ship is afloat, with a new Irish Ensign; but I
have scarce been about with her yet owing to ‘Mr. Wesley’s Troubles.’ [78a]
Only yesterday I took down my little Tauchnitz Sophocles to carry to Sea with me; and made Duncan here read—
οποια χρηζει ρηyνυτω· τουμον δ' εyω, [78b] etc.
and began to blubber a little at
ω φίλτατ' Αιyέως παι, μονοις ου yίyνεται, etc.
in the other Great Play. [78c] The Elgin Marbles, and something more, began to pass before my Eyes.
I believe I write all this knowing you are at Ely: where I suppose you are more at Leisure than on your Throne in Trinity. But no doubt your Tyranny follows you there too; post Equitem and all.
To E. B. Cowell.
Woodbridge: Friday
[June, 1866].
My dear Cowell,
I got your new Address from your Brother a Fortnight ago. You don’t write to me for the very good reason that you have so much to do: I don’t write to you because I have nothing to do, and so nothing to tell you of. My idle reading all goes down to a few Memoirs and such things: I am not got down to Miss Braddon and Mrs. Wood yet, and I believe
never shall: not that I think this a merit: for it would show more Elasticity of Mind to find out and make something out of the Genius in them. But it is too late for me to try and retrace the ‘Salle des pas perdus’ of years; I have not been very well, and more and more ‘smell the Mould above the Rose’ as Hood wrote of himself. But I don’t want to talk of this.
You are very good to talk of sparing a Day for me when you come down. I will be sure to be at home any Day, or Days, next week. I can give you Bed and Board as you know: and a Boat Sail on the River if you like. Why I don’t go over to you I have written and spoken of enough—all I can, if not satisfactorily: only don’t think it is indolence, Neglect, or Distaste for you, or any of yours. . . .
I haven’t, I think, taken in your Sanskrit morsel as yet, for I am called about this morning on some Furniture Errands: and yet I want to post this Letter To-day that you may have it this week.
I still think I shall take a Tauchnitz Sophocles with me to Sea, once more to read the two Œdipuses, and Philoctetes; perhaps more carefully than before; perhaps not! It is stupid not to get up those three noble Pieces as well as one can.
I have not yet done my house: and, when I write of Furniture, it is because I want to get so much ready as will suffice for an Invalid Niece who wishes to come with her Maid by the End of June, or the Beginning of July. Your old opposite Neighbour
Mason is my Apollo in these matters: I find him a very clever Fellow, and so well inclined to me that every one else says he can scarce make money of what he sells me. He has humour too.
I think you and Elizabeth should one day come and stay in this new House, which will be really very pleasant. As far as I am concerned, I sha’n’t have much to do with it, I believe; but some one will inherit, and—sell it!
I want you to choose a Lot of my Things to be bequeathed you: Books, Pictures, Furniture. You mustn’t think I prematurely deck myself in Sables for my own Funeral; but it happens that I sent the rough Draft of a Will to my Lawyer only three days ago.
My Brother John so much wants a Copy of Elizabeth’s Verses to my Sister Isabella in other Days.
This time twenty years you were going to me at Boulge Cottage: this time ten years you were preparing for India.
Adieu, Love to the Lady.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
To W. H. Thompson.
Lowestoft: July 27 [1866].
My dear Thompson,
Your welcome Letter was forwarded to me here To day.
I feel sure that the Lady I once saw at the Deanery is all you say; and you believe of me, as I believe of myself, that I don’t deal in Compliment, unless under very strong Compulsion. I suppose, as Master of Trinity you could not do otherwise than marry, and so keep due State and Hospitality there: and I do think you could not have found one fitter to share, and do, the honours. And if (as I also suppose) there is Love, or Liking, or strong Sympathy, or what not? why, all looks well. Be it so!
I had not heard of Spedding’s entering into genteel House-keeping till your Letter told me of it. I suppose he will be a willing Victim to his Kinsfolk.
A clerical Brother in law of mine has lost his own whole Fortune in four of these Companies which have gone to smash. Nor his own only. For, having, when he married my Sister, insisted on having half her Income tied to him by Settlement, that half lies under Peril from the ‘Calls’ made upon him as Shareholder.
At Genus Humanum damnat Caligo Futuri.
So I, trusting in my Builder’s Honesty, have a Bill sent in about one third bigger than it should be.
All which rather amuses me, on the whole, though I spit out a Word now and then: and indeed am getting a Surveyor to overhaul the Builder: a hopeless Process, I believe all the while.
Meanwhile, I go about in my little Ship, where I do think I have two honest Fellows to deal with.
We have just been boarding a Woodbridge Vessel that we met in these Roads, and drinking a Bottle of Blackstrap round with the Crew.
With me just at present is my Brother Peter, for whose Wife (a capital Irishwoman, of the Mrs. O’Dowd Type) my Paper is edged with Black. No one could be a better Husband than he; no one more attentive and anxious during her last Illness, more than a year long; and, now all is over, I never saw him in better Health or Spirits. Men are not inconsolable for elderly Wives; as Sir Walter Scott, who was not given to caustic Aphorisms, observed long ago.
When I was sailing about the Isle of Wight, Dorsetshire, etc., I read my dear old Sophocles again (sometimes omitting the nonsense-verse Choruses) and thought how much I should have liked to have them commented along in one of your Lectures. All that is now over with you: but you will look into the Text now and then. I have now got Munro’s Lucretius on board again. Why is it that I never can take up with Horace—so sensible, elegant, agreeable, and sometimes even grand?
Some one gave me the July Number of the Cornhill to read the ‘Loss of the London’ in; and very well worth reading it is. But there is also the Beginning of a Story that I am sure must be by Annie Thackeray—capital and wonderful. I forget the name.
Now I won’t finish this Second Sheet—all with
such Scraps as the foregoing. But do believe how sincerely and truly I wish you well in your new Venture. And so I will shut up, my dear Thompson, for the present. No man can have more reason to wish you a good Return for your long generous Kindness than your old Friend,
E. F. G.
To E. B. Cowell.
Woodbridge: August 13/66.
My dear Cowell,
I think you have given me up as a bad Job: and I can’t blame you. I have been expecting to hear of you in these parts: though, had it been so, I doubt if I should have been here to meet you. For the last six weeks I have scarce been at home; what with sailing to the Isle of Wight, Norfolk Coast, staying at Lowestoft, etc. And now I am just off again to the latter place, having only returned here on Saturday. Nor can I say when I shall be back here for any long while: the Kerriches are at Lowestoft; and I have yet one or two more Sea-trips to make before October consigns me once more to Cold, Indoor Solitude, Melancholy, and Illhealth.
My Companion on board has been Sophocles, as he was three years ago, I find. I am even now going to hunt up some one-volume Virgil to take with me. Horace I never can care about, in spite of his Good Sense, Elegance, and occasional Force. He never made my Eyes wet as Virgil does.
When I was about Cromer Coast, I was reading Windham’s Diary: well worth reading, as one of the most honest; but with little else in it than that. You would scarcely guess from it that he was a man of any Genius, as yet I suppose he was.
Somehow I fancy you must be travelling abroad! Else surely I should have heard something of you. Well: I must anyhow enclose this Letter, or direct it, to your Mother’s or Brother’s at Ipswich. Do let me hear of yourself and Elizabeth, and believe that I do not forget you, nor cease to be
Yours very sincerely
Edward FitzGerald.
Lowestoft: August 19/66.
My dear Cowell,
I don’t wish you to think I am in Woodbridge all this while since your Note came. It was forwarded to me here, where I have been since I wrote to you a week ago. The fact is, I had promised to return on finding that the Kerriches were to be here. So, here I am: living on board my little Ship: sometimes taking them out for a Sail: sometimes accompanying them in a walk. In other respects, I am very fond of this Place, which I have known and frequented these forty years; till the last three years in company with my Sister Kerrich, who has helped to endear it to me. I believe I shall be here, off and on, some
while longer; as my Brother Peter (who has lately lost a capital Wife) is coming to sail about with me. Should I be at Woodbridge for some days I will let you know.
Do you see ‘Squire Allenby,’ as the folks at Felixtow Ferry call him? If so, ask him why he doesn’t sometimes sail here with his ship; he would like it, I fancy: and everybody seems to like him.
Only yesterday I finished reading the Electra. Before that, Ajax; which is well worth re-reading too. I am sorry to find I have only Antigone left of all the precious Seven; a lucid Constellation indeed! I suppose I must try Euripides after this; some few of his Plays.
This time ten years—a month ago—we were all lounging about in the hayfield before your Mother’s House at Rushmere. I do not forget these things: nor cease to remember them with a sincere, sad, and affectionate interest: the very sincerity of which prevents me from attempting to recreate them. This I wish you and yours, who have been so kind to me, to believe.
I am going to run again to the Coast of Norfolk—as far as Wells—to wander about Holkham, if the Weather permit. We have had too much Wind and Wet to make such excursions agreeable: for, when one reached the Places by Sea, the Rain prevented one’s going about on Shore to look about. But now that there has been rather a better look-out of Weather for the last few Days, and that—
δεινωντ' αημα πνευματων εκοίμισε
στένοντα ποντον— [86]
I shall try again for two or three Days. How do you translate δεινων here?
Ever yours, E. F. G.
Lowestoft still! Septr. 4 [1866].
My dear Cowell,
Still here, you see! Till the end of last week I had my Kerrich people here; I am now expecting my Brother Peter again: he has lately lost his capital Wife, and flies about between Ireland and England for Company and Diversion of Thought. I am also expecting Mowbray Donne over from Yarmouth this week.
I wonder if you ever would come over here, and either Bed and Board in my little Ship, or on Shore? Anyhow, do write me a line to tell me about yourself—yourselves—and do not think I am indifferent to you.
I have been reading Euripides (in my way) but, as heretofore do not take greatly to him. He is always prosy, whereas (except in the matter of funeral Lamentations, Condolence, etc., which I suppose the Greek Audience expected—as I suppose they also expected the little sententious truism at the end of every Speech), except in these respects, Sophocles always goes ahead, and makes his Dialogue act in
driving on the Play. He always makes the most of his Story too: Euripides not often. A remarkable instance of this is in his Heraclidæ (one of the better Plays, I think), where Macaria is to be sacrificed for the common good: but one hears no more of her: and a fine opportunity is lost when Jocasta [87a] insults Eurystheus whom they have conquered, and is never told that that Conquest is at the cost of her Grand-daughter’s Life—a piece of Irony which Sophocles would not have forgotten, I think. I have not yet read over Rhesus, Hippolytus, Medea, Ion, or the Iphigenias; altogether, the Phœnissæ is the best of those I have read; the interview between Jocasta and her two sons, before the Battle, very good. There is really Humour and Comedy in the Servant’s Account of Hercules’ conviviality in Admetus’ House of Mourning. I thought the story of the Bacchæ poorly told: but some good descriptive passages.
In the midst of Euripides, I was seized with a Passion to return to Sophocles, and read the two Œdipuses again. Oh, how immeasurably superior! In dramatic Construction, Dialogue, and all! How can they call Euripides τραyικωτατος, [87b] putting a few passages of his against whole Dramas of the other, who also can show sentence for sentence more moving than any Euripides wrote.
But I want to read these Plays once with some very accurate Guide, oral or printed. I mean
Sophocles; I don’t care to be accurate with the other. Can you recommend any Edition—not too German? I should write to Thompson about it; but I suppose he is busy with Marriage coming on. I mean, the present Master of Trinity, who is engaged to the widow of Dean Peacock; a very capital Lady to preside as Queen of Trinity Lodge.
I have also been visiting dear old Virgil; his Georgics, and the 6th and 8th Books of the Æneid. I could now take them up and read them both again. Pray look at lines 407-415 of Book VIII—the poor Matron kindling her early fire—so Georgic! so Virgilian! so unsuited, or disproportionate, to the Thing it illustrates.
Here is a long Letter—of the old Sort, I suppose. All these Books come back to me with Summer and the Sea: in another Month all will be gone together!—I look with Terror toward Winter, though I have not to encounter one, at any rate, of the three Giants which old Mrs. Bloomfield said were coming upon her—Winter, Want, and Sickness. [88]
Pray remember me, in spite of all practical Forgetfulness, to Wife and Friends.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
Woodbridge: Jan. 29/67.
My dear Frederic,
Let me hear from you one Day. I would send you my MS. Book of Morton’s Letters: but I scarce know if the Post would carry it to you; though not so very big: and I am still less sure that you would ever return it to me. And what odds if you didn’t? It might as well die in your Possession as in mine.
In answer to my yearly Letter to Alfred and Co. I heard (from Mrs.) that they were about to leave Freshwater, frightened away by Hero-worshippers, etc., and were going to a Solitude called Greyshott Hall, Haslemere; which, I am told, is in Hants. Whether they go to settle there I don’t know. Lucretius’ Death is thought to be too free-spoken for Publication, I believe; not so much in a religious, as an amatory, point of View. I should believe Lucretius more likely to have expedited his Departure because of Weariness of Life and Despair of the System, than because of any Love-philtre. I wrote also my yearly Letter to Carlyle, begging my compliments to his Wife: who, he replies, died, in a very tragical way, last April. I have since heard that the Papers reported all the Circumstances. So, if one lives so much out of the World as I do, it seems better to give up that Ghost altogether. Old Spedding has written a Pamphlet about ‘Authors
and Publishers’; showing up, or striving to show up, the Publishers’ system. He adduces his own Edition of Bacon as a sample of their mismanagement, in respect of too bulky Volumes, etc. But, as he says, Macaulay and Alison are still bulkier; yet they sell. The truth is that a solemnly-inaugurated new Edition of all Bacon was not wanted. The Philosophy is surely superseded; not a Wilderness of Speddings can give men a new interest in the Politics and Letters. The Essays will no doubt always be in request, like Shakespeare. But I am perhaps not a proper Judge of these high matters. How should I? who have just, to my great sorrow, finished ‘The Woman in White’ for the third time, once every last three Winters. I wish Sir Percival Clyde’s Death were a little less of the minor Theatre sort; then I would swallow all the rest as a wonderful Caricature, better than so many a sober Portrait. I really think of having a Herring-lugger I am building named ‘Marian Halcombe,’ the brave Girl in the Story. Yes, a Herring-lugger; which is to pay for the money she costs unless she goes to the Bottom: and which meanwhile amuses me to consult about with my Sea-folks. I go to Lowestoft now and then, by way of salutary Change: and there smoke a Pipe every night with a delightful Chap, who is to be Captain. I have been, up to this time, better than for the last two winters: but feel a Worm in my head now and then, for all that. You will say, only a Maggot. Well; we shall see. When I
go to Lowestoft, I take Montaigne with me; very comfortable Company. One of his Consolations for The Stone is, that it makes one less unwilling to part with Life. Oh, you think that it didn’t need much Wisdom to suggest that? Please yourself, Ma’am. January, just gone! February, only twenty-eight Days: then March with Light till six p.m.: then April with a blush of Green on the Whitethorn hedge: then May, Cuckoos, Nightingales, etc.; then June, Ship launched, and nothing but Ship till November, which is only just gone. The Story of our Lives from Year to Year. This is a poor letter: but I won’t set The Worm fretting. Let me hear how you are: and don’t be two months before you do so.
To W. B. Donne.
Woodbridge: Febr. 15 [1867].
My dear Donne,
I came home yesterday from a week’s Stay at Lowestoft. As to the Athenæum, [91] I would bet that the last Sentence was tacked on by the Editor: for it in some measure contradicts the earlier part of the Article.
When your letter was put into my hands, I happened to be reading Montaigne, L. ii. Ch. 8, De l’Art de Conferer, where at the end he refers to
Tacitus; the only Book, he says, he had read consecutively for an hour together for ten years. He does not say very much: but the Remarks of such a Man are worth many Cartloads of German Theory of Character, I think: their Philology I don’t meddle with. I know that Cowell has discovered they are all wrong in their Sanskrit. Montaigne never doubts Tacitus’ facts: but doubts his Inferences; well, if I were sure of his Facts, I would leave others to draw their Inferences. I mean, if I were Commentator, certainly: and I think if I were Historian too. Nothing is more wonderful to me than seeing such Men as Spedding, Carlyle, and I suppose Froude, straining Fact to Theory as they do, while a scatter-headed Paddy like myself can keep clear. But then so does the Mob of Readers. Well, but I believe in the Vox Populi of two hundred Years: still more, of two thousand. And, whether we be right or wrong, we prevail: so, however much wiser are the Builders of Theory, their Labour is but lost who build: they can’t reason away Richard’s Hump, nor Cromwell’s Ambition, nor Henry’s Love of a new Wife, nor Tiberius’ beastliness. Of course, they had all their Gleams of Goodness: but we of the Mob, if we have any Theory at all, have that which all Mankind have seen and felt, and know as surely as Day-light; that Power will tempt and spoil the Best.
Well, but what is all this Lecture to you for? Why, I think you rather turn to the re-actionary Party about these old Heroes. So I say, however
right you may be, leave us, the many-headed, if not the wise-headed, to go our way, only making the Text of Tacitus as clear for us to flounder about in as you can. That, anyhow, must be the first Thing. Something of the manners and customs of the Times we want also: some Lights from other contemporary Authors also: and then, ‘Gentlemen, you will now consider your Verdict, and please yourselves.’
Can’t you act on Spedding’s Advice and have your Prolegomena separate, if considerable in size? I don’t doubt its Goodness: but you know how, when one wants to take a Volume of an Author on Travel, Ship-board, etc., how angry one is with the Life, Commentary, etc., which takes up half the first volume. This we don’t complain of in George III. because he is not a Classic, and your Athenæum Critic admits that yours is the best Part of the Business by far.
To E. B. Cowell.
‘Scandal’; Lowestoft, June 17 [1867].
My dear Cowell,
I wrote to Elizabeth, I think, to congratulate you both on the result of the Election: I have since had your Letter: you will not want me to repeat what, without my ever having written or said, you will know that I feel. I wrote to Thompson on the subject, and have had a very kind Letter from him.
Now you will live at Cambridge among the Learned; but, I repeat, you would rather live among the Ignorant. However, your Path is cut out for you: and, to be sure, it is a more useful and proper one for you than the cool sequestered one which one might like to travel.
I am here in my little Ship—cool and sequestered enough, to be sure—with no Company but my Crew of Two, and my other—Captain of the Lugger now a-building: a Fellow I never tire of studying—If he should turn out knave, I shall have done with all Faith in my own Judgment: and if he should go to the Bottom of the Sea in the Lugger—I sha’n’t cry for the Lugger.
Well, but I have other Company too—Don Quixote—the 4th Part: where those Snobs, the Duke and Duchess—(how vulgar Great Folks then, as now!) make a Fool and Butt of him. Cervantes should have had more respect for his own Creation: but, I suppose, finding that all the Great Snobs could only laugh at the earlier part, he thought he had better humour them. This very morning I read the very verses you admired to me twenty years ago—
Ven muerte tan escondida, etc.
They are quoted ironically in Part iv. Lib. vii. Ch. 38.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
My dear Cowell,
When you have leisure you will let me know of your being settled at Cambridge? I also want to have your exact Address because I want to send you the Dryden and Crabbe’s Life I promised you. At present you are busy with your Inaugural Address, I suppose; beside that you feel scarce at home yet in your new Quarters.
Mr. Allenby told me on Wednesday that Mrs. Charlesworth was really up again, and even got to Cambridge. Please to remember me to her, and to all your Party.
My Ship is still afloat: but I have scarce used her during the last cold weather. I was indeed almost made ill sleeping two nights in that cold Cabin. I may, however, run to Lowestoft and back; but by the end of next week I suppose she (the Ship) will be laid up in the Mud; my Men will have eaten the Michaelmas Goose which I always regale them with on shutting up shop; and I may come home to my Fire here to read ‘The Woman in White’ and play at Patience:—which (I mean the Game at Cards so called) I now do by myself for an hour or two every night. Perhaps old Montaigne may drop in to chat with and comfort me: but Sophocles, Don Quixote, and Boccaccio—I think I must leave them with their Halo of Sea and Sunshine about them. I have, however, found the second volume of
Sophocles; and may perhaps return to look for Ajax and Deianeira.
Adieu: E. F. G.
To W. F. Pollock.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
October 28 [1867],
Now, My dear Pollock,
I have put on a new Goose-quill Nib, on purpose to write my best MS. to you. But the new Nib has very little to say for me: the old Story: dodging about in my Ship for these last five months: indeed during all that time not having lain, I believe, for three consecutive Nights in Christian Sheets. But now all that is over: this very day is my little Ship being dismantled, and to-morrow will she go up to her middle in mud, and here am I anchored to my old Desk for the Winter; and beginning, as usual, by writing to my Friends, to tell them what little there is to tell of myself, and asking them to tell what they can of themselves in return. I shall even fire a shot at old Spedding; who would not answer my last Letters at all: innocent as they were, I am sure: and asking definite Questions, which he once told me he required if I wanted any Answer. I suppose he is now in Cumberland. What is become of Bacon? Are you one of the Converted, who go the whole Hog?
Thompson—no, I mean the Master of Trinity—has replied to my half-yearly Enquiries in a very
kind Letter. He tells me that my friend Edward Cowell has pleased all the Audience he had with an inaugural Lecture about Sanskrit. [97a] Also, that there is such an Article in the Quarterly about the Talmud [97b] as has not been seen (so fine an Article, I mean) for years. I have had Don Quixote, Boccaccio, and my dear Sophocles (once more) for company on board: the first of these so delightful, that I got to love the very Dictionary in which I had to look out the words: yes, and often the same words over and over again. The Book really seemed to me the most delightful of all Books: Boccaccio, delightful too, but millions of miles behind; in fact, a whole Planet away.
To W. A. Wright.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
Dec. 11 [1867].
Dear Sir,
When Robert Groome was with me a month ago, I was speaking to him of having found some Bacon in Montaigne: and R. G. told me that you had observed the same, and were indeed collecting some instances; I think, quotations from Seneca, so employed as to prove that Bacon had them from the Frenchman. It has been the fashion of late to scoff at Seneca; whom such men as Bacon and Montaigne quoted: perhaps not Seneca’s own, but cribbed from some Greek which would have been admired by those who scoff at the Latin.
I had not noticed this Seneca coincidence: but I had observed a few passages of Montaigne’s own, which seemed to me to have got into Bacon’s Essays. I dare say I couldn’t light upon all these now; but, having been turning over Essai 9, Lib. iii. De la Vanité, I find one sentence which comes to the point: ‘Car parfois c’est bien choisir de ne choisir pas.’ In the same Essay is a piece of King Lear, perhaps; ‘De ce mesme papier où il vient d’escrire l’arrest de condemnation contre un Adultere, le Juge en desrobe un lopin pour en faire un poulet à la femme de son compaignon.’ One doesn’t talk of such things as of plagiarisms, of course; as if Bacon and Shakespeare couldn’t have said much better things themselves; only for the pleasure of tracing where they read, and what they were struck by. I see that ‘L’Appetit vient en mangeant’ is in the same Essay.
If I light some other day on the other passages, I will take the liberty of telling you. You see I have already taken the liberty of writing to a man, not unknown to me in several ways, but with whom I have not the pleasure of being acquainted personally. Perhaps I may have that pleasure one of these days; we are both connected with the same town of Beccles, and may come together. I hope so.
But I have also another reason for writing to you. Your ‘Master’ wrote me word the other day, among other things, that you as well as he wished for my own noble works in your Library. I quite understand that this is on the ground of my being a
Trinity man. 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. This is, I know, my sincere feeling on the subject. However, as I think some of the Translations I have done are all I can dare to show, and as it would be making too much fuss to wait for any further asking on the subject, I will send them if you think good one of these days all done up together; the Spanish, at least, which are, I think, all of a size. Will you tell the Master so if you happen to see him and mention the subject? Allow me to end by writing myself yours sincerely,
Edward FitzGerald.
To E. B. Cowell.
12 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft.
Dec. 28 [1867].
My dear Cowell,
. . . I don’t think I told you about Garcin de Tassy. He sent me (as no doubt he sent you) his annual Oration. I wrote to thank him: and said I
had been lately busy with another countryman of his, Mons. Nicolas, with his Omar Khayyám. On which De Tassy writes back by return of post to ask ‘Where I got my Copy of Nicolas? He had not been able to get one in all Paris!’ So I wrote to Quaritch: who told me the Book was to be had of Maisonneuve, or any Oriental Bookseller in Paris; but that probably the Shopman did not understand, when ‘Les Rubáiyát d’Omar, etc.,’ were asked for, that it meant ‘Les Quatrains, etc.’ This (which I doubt not is the solution of the Mystery) I wrote to Garcin: at the same time offering one of my two Copies. By return of Post comes a frank acceptance of one of the Copies; and his own Translation of Attár’s Birds by way of equivalent. τοιονδ' απέβη τοδε πραyγμα. Well, as I got these Birds just as I was starting here, I brought them with me, and looked them over. Here, at Lowestoft, in this same row of houses, two doors off, I was writing out the Translation I made in the Winter of 1859. I have scarce looked at Original or Translation since. But I was struck by this; that eight years had made little or no alteration in my idea of the matter: it seemed to me that I really had brought in nearly all worth remembering, and had really condensed the whole into a much compacter Image than the original. This is what I think I can do, with such discursive things: such as all the Oriental things I have seen are. I remember you thought that I had lost the Apologues towards the close; but I believe
I was right in excluding them, as the narrative grew dramatic and neared the Catastrophe. Also, it is much better to glance at the dangers of the Valley when the Birds are in it, than to let the Leader recount them before: which is not good policy, morally or dramatically. When I say all this, you need not suppose that I am vindicating the Translation as a Piece of Verse. I remember thinking it from the first rather disagreeable than not: though with some good parts. Jam satis.
There is a pretty story, which seems as if it really happened (p. 201 of De Tassy’s Translation, referring to v. 3581 of the original), of the Boy falling into a well, and on being taken out senseless, the Father asking him to say but a word; and then, but one word more: which the Boy says and dies. And at p. 256, Translation (v. 4620), I read, ‘Lorsque Nizâm ul-mulk fut à l’agonie, il dit: “O mon Dieu, je m’en vais entre les mains du vent.”’ Here is our Omar in his Friend’s mouth, is it not?
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. Indeed I never proposed Gain, as you may imagine: but only
to have some Interest with this dear Fellow. Happy New Year to you Both!
I wish you would have Semelet’s Gulistan which I have. You know I never cared for Sadi.
To W. F. Pollock.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Jan: 9/68.
My dear Pollock,
I saw advertised in my old Athenæum a Review [102] of Richardson’s Novels in the January Cornhill. So I bought it: and began to think you might have written it: but was not so assured as I went on. It is however very good, in my opinion, whoever did it: though I don’t think it does all justice to the interminable Original. When the Writer talks of Grandison and Clarissa being the two Characters—oh, Lovelace himself should have made the third: if unnatural (as the Reviewer says), yet not the less wonderful: quite beyond and above anything in Fielding. Whether you wrote the article or not, I know you are one of the few who have read the Book. The Reviewer admits that it might be abridged; I am convinced of that, and have done it for my own satisfaction: but you thought this was not to be done. So here is internal proof that you didn’t write what Thackeray used to call the ‘Hurticle,’ or that you have changed your mind on that score. But you haven’t. But I
know better, Lord bless you: and am sure I could (with a pair of Scissors) launch old Richardson again: we shouldn’t go off the stocks easy (pardon nautical metaphors), but stick by the way, amid the jeers of Reviewers who had never read the original: but we should float at last. Only I don’t want to spend a lot of money to be hooted at, without having time to wait for the floating.
I have spent lots of money on my Herring-lugger, which has made but a poor Season. So now we are going (like wise men) to lay out a lot more for Mackerel; and my Captain (a dear Fellow) is got ill, which is much worst of all: so hey for 1868! Which is wishing you better luck next time, Sir, etc.
Spedding at last found and sent me his delightful little Paper about Twelfth Night. I was glad to be set right about Viola: but I think he makes too much of the whole play, ‘finest of Comedies,’ etc. It seems to me quite a light, slight, sketch—for Twelfth Night—What you will, etc. What else does the Name mean? Have I uttered these Impieties! No more! Nameless as shameless.
To E. B. Cowell.
Woodbridge: May 28/68.
My dear Cowell,
I was just about to post you your own Calcutta Review when your Letter came, asking about some Euphranors. Oh yes! I have a Lot of them:
returned from Parker’s when they were going to dissolve their House; I would not be at the Bother of any further negociation with any other Bookseller, about half a dozen little Books which so few wanted: so had them all sent here. I will therefore send you six copies. I had supposed that you didn’t like the second Edition so well as the first: and had a suspicion myself that, though I improved it in some respects, I had done more harm than good: and so I have never had courage to look into it since I sent it to you at Oxford. Perhaps Tennyson [104] only praised the first Edition and I don’t know where to lay my hands on that. I wonder he should have thought twice about it. Not but I think the Truth is told: only, a Truth every one knows! And told in a shape of Dialogue really something Platonic: but I doubt rather affectedly too. However, such as it is, I send it you. I remember being anxious about it twenty years ago, because I thought it was the Truth (as if my telling it could mend the matter!): and I cannot but think that the Generation that has grown up in these twenty years has not profited by the Fifty Thousand Copies of this great work!
I am sorry to trouble you about Macmillan; I should not have done so had I kept my Copy with your corrections as well as my own. As Lamb said of himself, so I say; that I never had any Luck with
printing: I certainly don’t mean that I have had much cause to complain: but, for instance, I know that Livy and Napier, put into good Verse, are just worth a corner in one of the swarm of Shilling Monthlies. [105]
‘Locksley Hall’ is far more like Lucretius than the last Verses put into his mouth by A. T. But, once get a Name in England, and you may do anything. But I dare say that wise men too, like Spedding, will be of the same mind with the Times Critic. (I have not seen him.) What does Thompson say? You, I, and John Allen, are among the few, I do say, who, having a good natural Insight, maintain it undimmed by public, or private, Regards.
P.S. Having consulted my Landlord, I find that I can pay carriage all through to Cambridge. Therefore it is that I send you, not only your own Book, and my own, but also one of the genteel copies of Boswell’s Johnson; and Wesley’s Journal: both of which I gave you, only never sent! Now they shall go. Wesley, you will find pleasant to dip into, I think: of course, there is much sameness; and I think you will allow some absurdity among so much wise and good. I am almost sorry that I have not noted down on the fly-leaf some of the more remarkable Entries, as I have in my own Copy. If you have not read the little Autobiography of Wesley’s Disciple, John Nelson, give a shilling for it. It
seems to me something wonderful to read these Books, written in a Style that cannot alter, because natural; while the Model Writers, Addison, Johnson, etc., have had their Day. Dryden holds, I think: he did not set up for a Model Prose man. Sir T. Browne’s Style is natural to him, one feels.
Felixtow Ferry: July 25 [1868.]
My dear Cowell,
I found your Letter on reaching Woodbridge yesterday; where you see I did not stay long. In fact I only left Lowestoft partly to avoid a Volunteer Camp there which filled the Town with People and Bustle: and partly that my Captain might see his Wife: who cannot last very much longer I think: scarcely through Autumn, surely. She goes about, nurses her children, etc., but grows visibly thinner, weaker, and more ailing.
If the Wind changes (now directly in our Teeth) I shall sail back to Lowestoft to-morrow. Thompson and Mrs. T. propose to be at the Royal Hotel there till Wednesday, and we wish, I believe, to see each other again. Sailing did not agree with his bilious temperament: and he seemed to me injudicious in his hours of Exercise, Dinner, etc. But he, and she, should know best. I like her very much: head and heart right feminine of the best, it seemed to me: and her experience of the World, and the Wits, not having injured either.
I only wanted Macmillan to return the Verses [107] if he wouldn’t use them, because of my having no corrected Copy of them.
I see in the last Athenæum a new ‘and revised’ Edition of Clarissa advertised. I suppose this ‘revised’ does not mean ‘abridged,’ without which the Book will not permanently make way, as I believe. That, you know, I wanted to do: could do: and nearly have done;—But that, and my Crabbe, I must leave for my Executors and Heirs to consign to Lumber-room, or fire.
Pray let me hear of your movements, especially such as tend hitherward. About September—Alas!—I think we shall be a good Deal here, or at Woodbridge; probably not so much before that time.
Ever yours and Lady’s, E. F. G.
Woodbridge: March 1/69.
My dear Cowell,
. . . My Lugger Captain has just left me to go on his Mackerel Voyage to the Western Coast; and I don’t know when I shall see him again. Just after he went, a muffled bell from the Church here began to toll for somebody’s death: it sounded like a Bell under the sea. He sat listening to the Hymn played by the Church chimes last evening, and said he could hear it all as if in Lowestoft Church when he was a Boy, ‘Jesus our Deliverer!’ You can’t think what a grand, tender, Soul this is, lodged in a suitable carcase.
[1869.]
Dear Mrs. Thompson,
(I must get a new Pen for you—which doesn’t promise to act as well as the old one—Try another.)
Dear Mrs. Thompson—Mistress of Trinity—(this does better)—
I am both sorry, and glad, that you wrote me the Letter you have written to me: sorry, because I think it was an effort to you, disabled as you are; and glad, I need not say why.
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. But then, the Colour, the Dove-colour, subdued so as to carry off the richer tints of the dear Girl’s dress; and she, too, pensive, not sentimental: a Lady, as her Painter was a Gentleman. Faded as it is in the face (the Lake, which he would use, having partially flown), it is one of the most beautiful things of his I have seen: more
varied in colour; not the simple cream-white dress he was fond of, but with a light gold-threaded Scarf, a blue sash, a green chair, etc. . . .
I was rather taken aback by the Master’s having discovered my last—yes, and bonâ-fide my last—translation in the volume I sent to your Library. I thought it would slip in unobserved, and I should have given all my little contributions to my old College, without after-reckoning. Had I known you as the Wife of any but the ‘quondam’ Greek Professor, I should very likely have sent it to you: since it was meant for those who might wish for some insight into a Play [109] which I must think they can scarcely have been tempted into before by any previous Translation. It remains to be much better done; but if Women of Sense and Taste, and Men of Sense and Taste (who don’t know Greek) can read, and be interested in such a glimpse as I give them of the Original, they must be content, and not look the Horse too close in the mouth, till a better comes to hand.
My Lugger has had (along with her neighbours) such a Season hitherto of Winds as no one remembers. We made £450 in the North Sea; and (just for fun) I did wish to realize £5 in my Pocket. But my Captain would take it all to pay Bills. But if he makes another £400 this Home Voyage! Oh, then we shall have money in our Pockets. I do wish this. For the anxiety about all these People’s lives
has been so much more to me than all the amusement I have got from the Business, that I think I will draw out of it if I can see my Captain sufficiently firm on his legs to carry it on alone. True, there will then be the same risk to him and his ten men, but they don’t care; only I sit here listening to the Winds in the Chimney, and always thinking of the Eleven hanging at my own fingers’ ends.
This Letter is all desperately about me and mine, Translations and Ships. And now I am going to walk in my Garden: and feed my Captain’s Pony with white Carrots; and in the Evening have my Lad come and read for an hour and a half (he stumbles at every third word, and gets dreadfully tired, and so do I; but I renovate him with Cake and Sweet Wine), and I can’t just now smoke the Pipe nor drink the Grog. ‘These are my Troubles, Mr. Wesley;’ [110] but I am still the Master’s and Mistress’ loyal Servant,
Edward FitzGerald.
Woodbridge: Tuesday,
[28 Dec. 1869.]
My dear Cowell,
Your Letter to day was a real pleasure—nay, a comfort—to me. For I had begun to think that, for whatever reason, you had dropt me; and I know not one of all my friends whom I could less afford to lose.
You anticipate rightly all I think of the new Idylls. [111] I had bought the Book at Lowestoft: and when I returned here for Christmas found that A. T.’s Publisher had sent me a Copy. As I suppose this was done by A. T.’s order, I have written to acknowledge the Gift, and to tell him something, if not all, of what I think of them. I do not tell him that I think his hand weakened; but I tell him (what is very true) that, though the main Myth of King Arthur’s Dynasty in Britain has a certain Grandeur in my Eyes, the several legendary fragments of it never did much interest me; excepting the Morte, which I suppose most interested him also, as he took it up first of all. I am not sure if such a Romance as Arthur’s is not best told in the artless old English in which it was told to Arthur’s artless successors four hundred years ago; or dished up anew in something of a Ballad Style like his own Lady of Shalott, rather than elaborated into a modern
Epic form. I never cared, however, for any chivalric Epic; neither Tasso, nor Spenser, nor even Ariosto, whose Epic has a sort of Ballad-humour in it; Don Quixote is the only one of all this sort I have ever cared for.
I certainly wish that Alfred had devoted his diminished powers to translating Sophocles, or Æschylus, as I fancy a Poet should do—one work, at any rate—of his great Predecessors. But Pegasus won’t be harnessed.
From which I descend to my own humble feet. I will send you some copies of Calderon when I have uncloseted and corrected them. As to Agamemnon, I bound up a Copy of him in the other Translations I sent to Trinity Library—not very wisely, I doubt; but I thought the Book would just be put up on its shelf, and I had given all I was asked for, or ever could be asked for. The Master, however, wrote me that it came to his Eyes, and I dare say he thought I had best have let Æschylus alone. My Version was not intended for those who know the Original; but, by hook or by crook, to interest some who do not. The Shape I have wrought the Play into is good, I think: the Dialogue good also: but the Choruses (though well contrived for the progress of the Story) are very false to Æschylus; and anyhow want the hand of a Poet. Mine, as I said, are only a sort of ‘Entr’ acte’ Music, which would be better supplied by Music itself.
I will send you in a day or two my Christmas
Gossip for the East Anglian, where I am more at home. But you have heard me tell it all before.
It is too late to wish you a good Christmas—(I wonder how you passed it, mine was solitary and dull enough) but you know I wish you all the Good the New Year can bring. Love to Elizabeth; do not be so long without writing again, if only half a dozen lines, to yours and hers sincerely,
E. F. G.
To S. Laurence.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Jan. 13/70.
My dear Laurence,
Can you tell me (in a line) how I should treat some old Pictures of mine which have somehow got rusty with the mixt damp and then fires (I suppose) of my new house, which, after being built at near double its proper cost, is just what I do not want, according to the usage of the Ballyblunder Family, of which I am a very legitimate offshoot?
If you were down here, I think I should make you take a life-size Oil Sketch of the Head and Shoulders of my Captain of the Lugger. You see by the enclosed that these are neither of them of a bad sort: and the Man’s Soul is every way as well proportioned, missing in nothing that may become A Man, as I believe. He and I will, I doubt, part Company; well as he likes me, which is perhaps as well as a sailor cares for any one but Wife and
Children: he likes to be, what he is born to be, his own sole Master, of himself, and of other men. So now I have got him a fair start, I think he will carry on the Lugger alone: I shall miss my Hobby, which is no doubt the last I shall ride in this world: but I shall also get eased of some Anxiety about the lives of a Crew for which I now feel responsible. And this last has been a Year of great Anxiety in this respect.
I had to run to London for one day about my Eyes (which, you see by my MS., are not in prime order at all) and saw a Sir Joshua at a Framer’s window, and brought it down. The face faded, but elegant and lady-like always; the dress in colour quite Venetian. It was in Leicester Square; I can’t think how all the world of Virtuosos kept passing and would not give twenty pounds for it. But you don’t rate Sir Joshua in comparison with Gainsboro’.
Woodbridge: Jan. 20/70.
My dear Laurence,
. . . My Captain lives at Lowestoft, and is there at present: he also in anxiety about his Wife who was brought to bed the very same day my Landlady died, and (as a letter from him this morning tells me) has a hard time of it. I should certainly like a large Oil-sketch, like Thackeray’s, done in your most hasty, and worst, style, to hang up with Thackeray and Tennyson, with whom he shares a certain Grandeur of Soul and Body. As you guess, the
colouring is (when the Man is all well) as fine as his form: the finest Saxon type: with that complexion which Montaigne calls ‘vif, mâle, et flamboyant’; blue eyes; and strictly auburn hair, that any woman might sigh to possess. He says it is coming off, as it sometimes does from those who are constantly wearing the close hot Sou’westers. We must see what can be done about a Sketch.
Lowestoft, February 27 [1870].
My dear Laurence,
. . . I came here a few days ago, for the benefit of my old Doctor, The Sea, and my Captain’s Company, which is as good. He has not yet got his new Lugger home; but will do so this week, I hope; and then the way for us will be somewhat clearer.
If you sketch in a head, you might send it down to me to look at, so as I might be able to guess if there were any likelihood in that way of proceeding. Merely the Lines of Feature indicated, even by Chalk, might do. As I told you, the Head is of the large type, or size, the proper Capital of a six foot Body, of the broad dimensions you see in the Photograph. The fine shape of the Nose, less than Roman, and more than Greek, scarce appears in the Photograph; the Eye, and its delicate Eyelash, of course will remain to be made out; and I think you excel in the Eye.
When I get home (which I shall do this week) I
will send you two little Papers about the Sea words and Phrases used hereabout, [116a] for which this Man (quite unconsciously) is my main Authority. You will see in them a little of his simplicity of Soul; but not the Justice of Thought, Tenderness of Nature, and all the other good Gifts which make him a Gentleman of Nature’s grandest Type.
Suffolk Hotel, Lowestoft, August 2/70.
Dear Laurence,
. . . The Lugger is now preparing in the Harbour beside me; the Captain here, there, and everywhere; with a word for no one but on business; the other side of the Man you saw looking for Birds’ Nests; all things in their season. I am sure the Man is fit to be King of a Kingdom as well as of a Lugger. To-day he gives the customary Dinner to his Crew before starting, and my own two men go to it; and I am asked too: but will not spoil the Fun.
I declare, you and I have seen A Man! Have we not? Made in the mould of what Humanity should be, Body and Soul, a poor Fisherman. The proud Fellow had better have kept me for a Partner in some of his responsibilities. [116b] But no; he must rule alone, as is right he should too.
I date from the Inn where my Letters are
addressed; but I write in the little Ship which I live in. My Nieces are now here; in the town, I mean; and my friend Cowell and his Wife; so I have more company than all the rest of the year. I try to shut my Eyes and Ears against all tidings of this damnable War, seeing that I can do no good to others by distressing myself.
To W. F. Pollock.
Bridgewood, Nov. 1, [1870].
My dear Pollock,
I must say that my savageness against France goes no further than wishing that the new and gay part of Paris were battered down; not the poor working part, no, nor any of the People destroyed. But I wish ornamental Paris down, because then I think the French would be kept quiet till they had rebuilt it. For what would France be without a splendid Palace? I should not wish any such Catastrophe, however, if Paris were now as I remember it: with a lot of old historic houses in it, old Gardens, etc., which I am told are now made away with. Only Notre Dame, the Tuileries, and perhaps the beautiful gilt Dome of the Invalides do I care for. They are historical and beautiful too.
But I believe it would be a good thing if the rest of Europe would take possession of France itself, and rule it for better or worse, leaving the French themselves to amuse and enlighten the world by their
Books, Plays, Songs, Bon Mots, and all the Arts and Sciences which they are so ingenious in. They can do all things but manage themselves and live at peace with others: and they should themselves be glad to have their volatile Spirits kept in order by the Good Sense and Honesty which other Nations certainly abound in more than themselves. [118a]
I see what I think very good remarks about them in old Palmerston’s Papers quoted in my Athenæum. [118b] He was just the Man they wanted, I think.
Woodbridge, Nov. 15, [1870].
My dear Pollock,
. . . Ah, I should like to hear Fidelio again, often as I have heard it. I do not find so much ‘Melody’ in it as you do: understanding by Melody that which asserts itself independently of Harmony, as Mozart’s Airs do. I miss it especially in Leonora’s Hope song. But, what with the story itself, and the Passion and Power of the Music it is set to, the Opera is one of those that one can hear repeated as often as any.
If any one ever would take a good suggestion from me, you might suggest to Mr. Sullivan, or some competent Musician, to adapt that Epilogue part of Tennyson’s King Arthur, beginning—
And so to bed; where yet in sleep I seem’d
To sail with Arthur, etc.
down to
And War shall be no more—
to adapt this, I say, to the Music of that grand last Scene in Fidelio: Sullivan & Co. supplying the introductory Recitative; beginning dreamily, and increasing, crescendo, up to where the Poet begins to ‘feel the truth and Stir of Day’; till Beethoven’s pompous March should begin, and the Chorus, with ‘Arthur is come, etc.’; the chief Voices raising the words aloft (as they do in Fidelio), and the Chorus thundering in upon them. It is very grand in Fidelio: and I am persuaded might have a grand effect in this Poem. But no one will do it, of course; especially in these Days when War is so far from being no more!
I want to hear Cherubini’s Medea, which I dare say I should find masterly and dull. I quite agree with you about the Italians: Mozart the only exception; who is all in all.
Woodbridge, Dec. 5/70.
My dear Pollock,
. . . Had not Sunday followed Saturday I was a little tempted to run up to hear Cherubini’s Medea,
which I saw advertised for the Night. But I believe I should feel strange at a Play now: and probably should not have sat the Opera half out. So you have a good Play, [120] and that well acted, at last, on English Boards! At the old Haymarket, I think: the pleasantest of all the Theatres (for size and Decoration) that I remember; yes, and for the Listons and Vestrises that I remember there in the days of their Glory. Vestris, in what was called a ‘Pamela Hat’ with a red feather; and, again, singing ‘Cherry Ripe,’ one of the Dozen immortal English Tunes. That was in ‘Paul Pry.’ Poor Plays they were, to be sure: but the Players were good and handsome, and—oneself was young—1822-3! There was Macready’s Virginius at old Covent Garden, an event never to be forgotten.
One Date leads to another. In talking one day about different Quotations which get abroad without people always knowing whence they are derived, I could have sworn that I remember Spring Rice mentioning one that he himself had invented, and had been amused at seeing quoted here and there—
Coldly correct and critically dull.
Now only last night I happened to see the Line quoted in the Preface to Frederick Reynolds’ (the Playwright’s) stupid Memoirs, published in 1827;
some time before Spring Rice would have thought of such things, I suppose. . . .
What Plays Reynolds’ were, which made George III. laugh so, and put £500 apiece into the writer’s Pocket! But then there were Lewis, Quick, Kemble, Edwin, Parsons, Palmer, Mrs. Jordan, etc. to act them.
Woodbridge, Jan. 22, [1871].
My dear Pollock,
My acquaintance with Spanish, as with other Literature, is almost confined to its Fiction; and of that I have read nothing to care about except Don Quixote and Calderon. The first is well worth learning Spanish for. When I began reading the Language more than twenty years ago, with Cowell who taught me nearly all I know, I tried some of the other Dramatists, Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega, Moratin, etc., but could take but little interest in them. All Calderon’s, I think, have something beautiful in them: and about a score of them altogether bear reading again, and will be remembered if read but once. But Don Quixote is the Book, as you know; to be fully read, I believe, in no language but its own, though delightful in any. You know as well as I that Spanish History has a good name; Mariana’s for one: and one makes sure that the Language, at any rate, must be suitable to relate great Things with. But I do not meddle with History.
There are very good Selections from the Spanish Dramas published in good large-type Octavo by Don Ochoa, printed (I think) by Baudry, in Paris. There is one volume of Calderon; one of Lopé, I believe: and one or two made up of other Playwrights. These Books are very easily got at any foreign Bookseller’s.
An Artist [122a] to whom I have lent my house for a while has been teaching me ‘Spanish Dominoes,’ a very good Game. He, and I, and the Captain whose Photo I sent you (did I not?) had a grand bout with it the other day. If I went about in Company again I think I should do as old Rossini did, carry a Box of Dominoes, or pack of Cards, which I think would set Conversation at ease by giving people something easy to do beside conversing. I say Rossini did this; but I only know of his doing it once, at Trouville, where F. Hiller met him, who has published the Conversations they had together.
Did you lead the very curious Paper in the Cornhill, [122b] a year back, I think, concerning the vext question of Mozart’s Requiem? It is curious as a piece of Evidence, irrespective of any musical Interest. Evidence, I believe, would compel a Law Court to decide that the Requiem was mainly, not Mozart’s, but his pupil Süssmayer’s. And perhaps the Law Court might justly so decide, if by
‘mainly’ one understood the more technical business of filling up the ideas suggested by the Master. But then those ideas are just everything; and no Court of Musical Equity but would decide, against all other Evidence, that those ideas were Mozart’s. It is known that he was instructing Süssmayer, almost with his last breath, about some drum accompaniments to the Requiem; and I have no doubt, hummed over the subjects, or melodies, of all.
To W. H. Thompson.
Woodbridge, Feb. 1, [1871],
My dear Master,
The Gorgias duly came last week, thank you: and I write rather earlier than I should otherwise have done to satisfy you on that point. Otherwise, I say, I should have waited awhile till I had gone over all the Notes more carefully, with some of the sweet-looking Text belonging to them; which would have taken some time, as my Eyes have not been in good trim of late, whether from the Snow on the Ground, and the murky Air all about one, or because of the Eyes themselves being two years older than when they got hurt by Paraffin.
The Introduction I have read twice, and find it quite excellently written. Surely I miss some—ay, more than some—of the Proof you sent me
two years ago; some of the Argument to prove the relation between this Dialogue and the Republic, and consequently of the Date that must be assigned to it. All that interested me then as it does now, and I would rather have seen the Introduction all the longer by it. Perhaps, however, I am confounding my remembrances of the Date question (which of course follows from the matter) with the Phædrus Introduction.
Then as to what I have seen of the Notes: they seem to me as good as can be. I do not read modern Scholars, and therefore do not know how generally the Style of English Note-writing may be [different] from that of the Latin one was used to. But your Notes, I know, seem excellent to me; I mean, in the Style of them (for of the Scholarship I am not a proper Judge); totally without pedantry of any sort, whether of solving unnecessary difficulties, carping at other Critics, etc., but plainly determined to explain what needs explanation in the shortest, clearest, way, and in a Style which is most of all suited to the purpose, ‘familiar but by no means vulgar,’ such as we have known in such cases, whether in Latin or English. My Quotation reminds me of yours: how sparingly, and always just to the point, introduced; Polus ‘gambolling’ from the Theme: old Wordsworth’s Robin Hood, etc. And the paraphrases you give of the Greek are so just the thing. I have not read Vaughan’s (?) Translation
of the Republic; which I am told is good. But this I know that I never met with any readable Translation of Plato. Whewell’s was intolerable. You should have translated—(that is, paraphrased, for however far some People may err on this score, rushing in where Scholars fear to tread) a Translation must be Paraphrase to be readable; and especially in these Dialogues where the familiar Grace of the Narrative and Conversation is so charming a vehicle of the Philosophy. If people will conscientiously translate ω βέλτιστε ‘Oh most excellent man,’ when perhaps ‘My good Fellow’ was the thing meant, and ‘By the Dog!’ and so on, why, it is not English talk, and probably not Greek either. I say you should have, or should translate one or two Dialogues to show how they should be done; if no longer than the Lysis, or one of those small and sweet ones which I believe the Germans disclaim for Plato’s.
‘The Dog’ however does need a Note, as I suppose that, however far-fetched Olympiodorus’ suggestion, this was an Oath familiar to Socrates alone, and which he took up for some, perhaps whimsical, reason. It is not to be found (is it?) in Aristophanes, where I suppose all the common Oaths come in; but then again I wonder that, if it were Socrates’ Oath, it did not find its way into the Clouds, or perhaps into the criminal Charge against Socrates, as being a sort of mystical or scoffing Blasphemy.
I am afraid I tire you more with my Letter than you tired me with your Introduction, a good deal. And you see, to your cost, that my MS. does not argue much pleasure in the act of writing. But I would say my little say; which perhaps is all wrong. . . .
One of your Phrases I think truly delightful, about the Treasure to be sometimes found in a weak Vessel like Proclus. That I think is very Platonic; all the more for such things coming only now and then, which makes them tell. Modern Books lose by being over-crowded with good things.
* * * * *
In the course of this year 1871, FitzGerald parted with his little yacht the Scandal, so called, he said, because it was the staple product of Woodbridge, and on September 4 he wrote to me:—
Woodbridge: Septr. 4/71.
‘I run over to Lowestoft occasionally for a few days, but do not abide there long: no longer having my dear little Ship for company. I saw her there looking very smart under her new owner ten days ago, and I felt so at home when I was once more on her Deck that—Well: I content myself with sailing on the river Deben, looking at the Crops as they grow green, yellow, russet, and are finally carried away in the red and blue Waggons with the sorrel horse.’
[1871].
My dear Pollock,
. . . A night or two ago I was reading old Thackeray’s Roundabouts; and (sign of a good book) heard him talking to me. I wonder at his being so fretted by what was said of him as some of these Papers show that he was: very unlike his old self, surely. Perhaps Ill Health (which Johnson said made every one a Scoundrel) had something to do with this. I don’t mean that W. M. T. went this length: but in this one respect he was not so good as he used to be.
Annie Thackeray in her yearly letter wrote that she had heard from Mrs. A. T. that the Laureate was still suffering. I judge from your Letter that he is better. . . . I never heard any of his coadjutor Sullivan’s Music. Is there a Tune, or originally melodious phrase, in any of it? That is what I always missed in Mendelssohn, except in two or three of his youthful Pieces; Fingal and Midsummer Night’s Dream overtures, and Meeresstille. Chorley [127] mentions as a great instance of M.’s candour, that when some of his Worshippers were sneering at Donizetti’s ‘Figlia,’ M. silenced them by saying ‘Do you [know] I should like to have written it myself.’ If he meant that he ever could have written it if he had pleased, he ought to have had his nose tweaked.
I have been reading Sir Walter’s Pirate again, and am very glad to find how much I like it—that is speaking far below the mark—I may say how I wonder and delight in it. I am rejoiced to find that this is so; and I am quite sure that it is not owing to my old prejudice, but to the intrinsic merit and beauty of the Book itself. With all its faults of detail, often mere carelessness, what a broad Shakespearian Daylight over it all, and all with no Effort, and—a lot else that one may be contented to feel without having to write an Essay about. They won’t beat Sir Walter in a hurry (I mean of course his earlier, Northern, Novels), and he was such a fine Fellow that I really don’t believe any one would wish to cast him in the Shade. [128]
To T. Carlyle.
Woodbridge, Dec. 20, [1871].
Dear Carlyle,
Do not be alarmed at another Letter from me this year. It will need no answer: and is only written to tell you that I have not wholly neglected the wish you expressed in your last about the Naseby stone. I was reading, some months ago, your letters about our Naseby exploits in 1842: as also one which you wrote in 1855 (I think) about that Stone, giving me an Inscription for it. And it was not wholly my
fault that your wishes were not then fulfilled, though perhaps I was wanting in due energy about the matter. Thus, however, it was; that when you wrote in 1855, we had just sold Naseby to the Trustees of Lord Clifden: and, as there was some hitch in the Business (Lord Carlisle being one of the Trustees), I was told I had better not put in my oar. So the matter dropt. Since then Lord Clifden is dead: and I do not know if the Estate belongs to his Family. But, on receiving your last Letter, I wrote to the Lawyers who had managed for Lord Clifden to know about it: but up to this hour I have had no answer. Thus much I have done. If I get the Lawyer’s and Agent’s consent, I should be very glad indeed to have the stone cut, and lettered, as you wished. But whether I should pluck up spirit to go myself and set it up on the proper spot, I am not so sure; and I cannot be sure that any one else could do it for me. Those who were with me when I dug up the bones are dead, or gone; and I suppose the Plough has long ago obliterated the traces of sepulture, in these days of improved Agriculture; and perhaps even the Tradition is lost from the Memory of the Generation that has sprung up since I, and the old Parson, and the Scotch Tenant, turned up the ground. You will think me very base to hesitate about such a little feat as a Journey into Northamptonshire for this purpose. But you know that one does not generally grow more active in Travel as one gets older: and I have been a bad Traveller all my life.
So I will promise nothing that I am not sure of doing. Only, if you continue to desire this strongly, when next Summer comes, I will resolve upon it if I can.
These Naseby Letters of yours—they are all yours I have preserved, because (as in the case of Tennyson and Thackeray) I would not leave anything of private personal history behind me, lest it should fall into some unscrupulous hand. Even these Naseby letters—would you wish them returned to you? Only in case you should desire this, trouble yourself to answer me now.
To W. F. Pollock.
Woodbridge, Dec. 24, [1871]
My dear Pollock,
. . . The Pirate is, I know, not one of Scott’s best: the Women, Minna, Brenda, Norna, are poor theatrical figures. But Magnus and Jack Bunce and Claud Halcro (though the latter rather wearisome) are substantial enough: how wholesomely they swear! and no one ever thinks of blaming Scott for it. There is a passage where the Company at Burgh Westra are summoned by Magnus to go down to the Shore to see the Boats go off to the Deep Sea fishing, and ‘they followed his stately step to the Shore as the Herd of Deer follows the leading Stag, with all manner of respectful Observance.’ This, coming in at the close of the preceding unaffected Narrative is
to me like Homer, whom Scott really resembles in the simplicity and ease of his Story. This is far more poetical in my Eyes than all the Effort of ---, ---, etc. And which of them has written such a Lyric as ‘Farewell to Northmaven’? I finished the Book with Sadness; thinking I might never read it again. . . .
P.S. Can’t you send me your Paper about the Novelists? As to which is the best of all I can’t say: that Richardson (with all his twaddle) is better than Fielding, I am quite certain. There is nothing at all comparable to Lovelace in all Fielding, whose Characters are common and vulgar types; of Squires, Ostlers, Lady’s maids, etc., very easily drawn. I am equally sure that Miss Austen cannot be third, any more than first or second: I think you were rather drawn away by a fashion when you put her there: and really old Spedding seems to me to have been the Stag whom so many followed in that fashion. She is capital as far as she goes: but she never goes out of the Parlour; if but Magnus Troil, or Jack Bunce, or even one of Fielding’s Brutes, would but dash in upon the Gentility and swear a round Oath or two! I must think the ‘Woman in White,’ with her Count Fosco, far beyond all that. Cowell constantly reads Miss Austen at night after his Sanskrit Philology is done: it composes him, like Gruel: or like Paisiello’s Music, which Napoleon liked above all other, because he said it didn’t interrupt his Thoughts.
My dear Pollock,
If you come here, come some very fine weather, when we look at our best inland, and you may take charge of my Boat on the River. I doubt I did my Eyes damage this Summer by steering in the Sun, and peering out for the Beacons that mark the Channel; but your Eyes are proof against this, and I shall resign the command to you, as you wrote that you liked it at Clovelly. . . .
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. There was a fine passage quoted from his Last Idyll: about a Wave spending itself away on a long sandy Shore: that was Lincolnshire, I know.
Carlyle has written to remind me of putting up a Stone on the spot in Naseby field where I dug up the Dead for him thirty years ago. I will gladly have the Stone cut, and the Inscription he made for it engraved: but will I go again to Northamptonshire to see it set up? And perhaps the people there have forgotten all about the place, now that a whole
Generation has passed away, and improved Farming has passed the Plough over the Ground. But we shall see.
To W. A. Wright.
Woodbridge, Jan. 20/72.
By way of flourishing my Eyes, I have been looking into Andrew Marvell, an old favourite of mine, who led the way for Dryden in Verse, and Swift in Prose, and was a much better fellow than the last, at any rate.
Two of his lines in the Poem on ‘Appleton House,’ with its Gardens, Grounds, etc., run:
But most the Hewel’s wonders are,
Who here has the Holtseltster’s care.
The ‘Hewel’ being evidently the Woodpecker, who, by tapping the Trees, etc., does the work of one who measures and gauges Timber; here, rightly or wrongly, called ‘Holtseltster.’ ‘Holt’ one knows: but what is ‘seltster’? I do not find either this word or ‘Hewel’ in Bailey or Halliwell. But ‘Hewel’ may be a form of ‘Yaffil,’ which I read in some Paper that Tennyson had used for the Woodpecker in his Last Tournament. [133]
This reminded me that Tennyson once said to me, some thirty years ago, or more, in talking of Marvell’s ‘Coy Mistress,’ where it breaks in—
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, etc.
‘That strikes me as Sublime, I can hardly tell why. Of course, this partly depends on its place in the Poem.
Apropos of the Woodpecker, a Clergyman near here was telling our Bookseller Loder, that, in one of his Parishioners’ Cottages, he observed a dried Woodpecker hung up to the Ceiling indoors; and was told that it always pointed with its Bill to the Quarter whence the Wind blew.
To Miss Anna Biddell.
Woodbridge. Feb. 22, [1872].
. . . I have lost the Boy who read to me so long and so profitably: and now have another; a much better Scholar, but not half so agreeable or amusing a Reader as his Predecessor. We go through Tichborne without missing a Syllable, and, when Tichborne is not long enough, we take to Lothair! which has entertained me well. So far as I know of the matter, his pictures of the manners of English High Life are good: Lothair himself I do not care for, nor for the more romantic parts, Theodora, etc. Altogether the Book is like a pleasant Magic Lantern: when it is over, I shall forget it: and shall want to return to what I do not forget, some of Thackeray’s monumental Figures of ‘pauvre et triste Humanité,’
as old Napoleon called it: Humanity in its Depths, not in its superficial Appearances.
To W. F. Pollock.
The Old Place, Feb. 25/72.
. . . Aldis Wright must be right about ‘sear’ [135a]—French serre he says. What a pity that Spedding has not employed some of the forty years he has lost in washing his Blackamoor in helping an Edition of Shakespeare, though not in the way of these minute archæologic Questions! I never heard him read a page but he threw some new Light upon it. When you see him pray tell him I do not write to him, because I judge from experience that it is a labour to him to answer, unless it were to do me any service I asked of him except to tell me of himself.
My heart leaped when the Boy read me the Attorney General’s Quotation from A. T. [135b]
From T. Carlyle.
Chelsea, 15, June, 1872.
Dear FitzGerald,
I am glad that you are astir on the Naseby-Monument question; and that the auspices are so favourable. This welcome ‘Agent,’ so willing and beneficent, will
contrive, I hope, to spare you a good deal of the trouble,—except indeed that of seeing with your own eyes that the Stone is put in its right place, and the number of ‘yards rearward’ is exactly given.
I think the Inscription will do; and as to the shape, etc., of the monument, I have nothing to advise,—except that I think it ought to be of the most perfect simplicity, and should [136] go direct to its object and punctually stop there. A small block of Portland stone—(Portland excels all stones in the world for durability and capacity for taking an exact inscription)—block of Portland stone of size to contain the words and allow itself to be sunk firmly in the ground; to me it could have no other good quality whatever; and I should not care if the stone on three sides of it were squared with the hammer merely, and only polished on its front or fourth side where the letters are to be.
In short I wish you my dear friend to take charge of this pious act in all its details; considering me to be loyally passive to whatever you decide on respecting it. If on those terms you will let me bear half the expense and flatter myself that in this easy way I have gone halves with you in this small altogether genuine piece of patriotism, I shall be extremely obliged to you.
Pollock has told you an altogether flattering tale about my strength, as it is nearly impossible for any person still on his feet to be more completely useless.
Yours ever truly,
T. Carlyle.
J. A. Froude (just come to walk with me) scripsit.
Woodbridge, June 16, [1872].
My dear Pollock,
Some forty years ago there was a set of Lithograph Outlines from Hayter’s Sketches of Pasta in Medea: caricature things, though done in earnest by a Man who had none of the Genius of the Model he admired. Looking at them now people who never saw the Original will wonder perhaps that Talma and Mrs. Siddons should have said that they might go to learn of Her: and indeed it was only the Living Genius and Passion of the Woman herself that could have inspired and exalted, and enlarged her very incomplete Person (as it did her Voice) into the Grandeur, as well as the Niobe Pathos, of her Action and Utterance. All the nobler features of Humanity she had indeed: finely shaped Head, Neck, Bust, and Arms: all finely related to one another: the superior Features too of the Face fine: Eyes, Eyebrows—I remember Trelawny saying they reminded him of those in the East—the Nose not so fine: but the whole Face ‘homogeneous’ as Lavater calls it, and capable of all expression, from Tragedy to Farce. For I have seen her in the ‘Prova d’ un’ Opera Seria,’ where no one, I believe, admired her but myself, except Thomas Moore, whose Journal long after published revealed to me one who thought,—yes, and knew—as I did. Well, these Lithographs
are as mere Skeleton Outlines of the living Woman, but I suppose the only things now to give an Idea of her, I have been a dozen years looking out for a Copy.
I think I love the Haymarket as much as any part of London because of the Little Theatre where Vestris used to sing ‘Cherry Ripe’ in her prime: and (soon after) because of the old Bills on the opposite Colonnade: ‘Medea in Corinto. Medea, Signora Pasta.’ You know what she said, to the Confusion of all æsthetic People, one of whom said to her, ‘sans doute vous avez beaucoup étudié l’Antique?’ ‘Peut-être je l’ai beaucoup senti.’
My dear Pollock,
I have remembered, since last writing to you, that the Hayter Sketches were published by Dickenson of Bond Street, about 1825-6, I fancy. I have tried to get them, and all but succeeded two years ago. I am afraid they would give you and Miss Bateman the impression that Pasta played the Virago: which was not so at all. Her scene with her Children was among the finest of all: and it was well known at the time how deeply she felt it. But I suppose the stronger Situations offered better opportunities for the pencil, such a pencil as Hayter’s. I used to admire as much as anything her Attitude and Air as she stood at the side of the Stage when Jason’s Bridal Procession
came on: motionless, with one finger in her golden girdle: a habit which (I heard) she inherited from Grassini. The finest thing to me in Pasta’s Semiramide was her simple Action of touching Arsace’s Shoulder when she chose him for husband. She was always dignified in the midst of her Passion: never scolded as her Caricature Grisi did. And I remember her curbing her Arsace’s redundant Action by taking hold of her (Arsace’s) hands, Arsace being played by Brambilla, who was (I think) Pasta’s Niece. [139a]
Woodbridge, July 4/72.
My dear Pollock,
I like your Fraser Paper very much, and recognised some points we had talked of together, [139b] but nothing that I can claim as my own. I suppose that I think on these points as very many educated men do think; I mean as to Principles of Art. I am not sure I understand your word ‘Imagination’ as opposed to realistic (d---d word) detail at p. 26, but I suppose I suppose I know what is meant, nevertheless, and agree with that. Is the Prophet of p. 24 Gurlyle? [139c] I think so. The fine head of him which figures as Frontispiece to the People’s Edition of Sartor made me think of a sad Old Prophet; so that I bought the Book for the Portrait only.
The ‘Brown Umbrella’ pleased me greatly.
Well; and I thought there were other Papers in Fraser which made me think that, on the whole, I would take in Fraser rather than the Cornhill which you advised. Perhaps I am just now out of tune for Novels; whether that be so or not, I don’t get an Appetite for Annie Thackeray’s [140] from the two Numbers I have had.
And here is Spedding’s vol. vi. which leaves me much where it found me about Bacon: but though I scarce care for him, I can read old Spedding’s pleading for him for ever; that is, old Spedding’s simple statement of the case, as he sees it. The Ralegh Business is quite delightful, better than Old Kensington.
Then I have bought 3 vols of the ‘Ladies Magazine’ for 1750-3 by ‘Jasper Goodwill’ who died at Vol. iv. It contains the Trials and Executions (16 men at a time) of the time; Miss Blandy above all; and such delightful Essays, Poems, and Enigmas, for Ladies! The Allegories are in the Rasselas style, all Oriental. The Essays ‘of all the Virtues which adorn, etc.’ Then Anecdotes of the Day: as of a Country woman in St. James’ Park taking on because she cannot go home till she has kissed the King’s hand: one of the Park keepers tells one of the Pages, who tells the King, who has the Woman in to kiss his hand, and take some money beside. One wonders there weren’t heaps of such loyal Subjects.
Mowbray Donne wrote me that he sent you the Fragments I had saved and transcribed of Morton’s Letters; the best part having been lost by Blackwood’s People thirty years ago, as I believe I told you. But don’t you think what remains capital? I wish you would get them put into some Magazine, just for the sake of some of our Day getting them in Print. You might just put a word of Preface as to the Author: an Irish Gentleman, of Estate and Fortune (which of course went the Irish way), who was Scholar, Artist, Newspaper Correspondent, etc. A dozen lines would tell all that is wanted, naming no names. It might be called ‘Fragments of Letters by an “Ill-starred” or “Unlucky” Man of Genius,’ etc. as S. M. was: ‘Unlucky’ being still used in Suffolk, with something of Ancient Greek meaning. See if you cannot get this done, will you? For I think many of S. M.’s friends would be glad of it: and the general Public assuredly not the worse. Some of the names would need some correction, I think: and the Letters to be put in order of Time. [141a] ‘Do it!’ as Julia in the Hunchback says.
My dear Pollock,
I went to London at the end of last week, on my way to Sydenham, where my second Brother is staying, whom I had not seen these six years, nor his Wife. . . . On Saturday I went to the Academy, for little else but to see Millais, and to disagree with you about him! I thought his three Women and his Highlanders brave pictures, which you think also; but braver than you think them. The Women looked alive: the right Eye so much smaller than the left in the Figure looking at you that I suppose it was so in the original, so that I should have chosen one of the other Sisters for the position. I could not see any analogy between the Picture and Sir Joshua’s Graces, except that there were Three. Nor could I think the Highlanders in the Landscape vulgar; they seemed to me in character with the Landscape. Both Pictures want tone, which may mean Glazing: wanting which they may last the longer, and sober down of themselves without the danger of cracking by any transparent Colour laid over them.
I scarce looked at anything else, not having much time. Just as I was going out, who should come up to me but Annie Thackeray, who took my hands as really glad to see her Father’s old friend. I am sure she was; and I was taken aback somehow; and, out of sheer awkwardness, began to tell her that I didn’t care for her new Novel! And then, after she had left her Party to come to me, I ran off! It is true, I had to be back at Sydenham: but it would have been better to forgo all that: and so I reflected when I had got halfway down Piccadilly: and so ran back, and went into the Academy again: but could not find A. T. She told me she was going to Normandy this week: and I have been so vext with myself that I have written to tell her something of what I have told you. It was very stupid indeed.
Woodbridge: November 1, [1872].
My dear Pollock,
The Spectator, as also the Athenæum, somewhat over-praise Gareth, I think: but I am glad they do so. . . . The Poem seems to me scarce more worthy of what A. T. was born to do than the other Idylls; but you will almost think it is out of contradiction that I like it better: except, of course, the original Morte. The Story of this young Knight, who can submit and conquer and do all the Devoir of Chivalry, interests me much
more than the Enids, Lily Maids, etc. of former Volumes. But Time is—Time was—to have done with the whole Concern: pure and noble as all is, and in parts more beautiful than any one else can do. . . .
Rain—Rain—Rain! What will become of poor Italy? I think we ought to subscribe for her. Did you read of one French Caricature of the Pope leaving Rome with the Holy Ghost in a Bird Cage?
Woodbridge, Nov. 20.
My dear Pollock,
I am glad the Rogers Verses [144] gratified you. I forget where I saw them quoted, some ten years ago; but as I had long wished for them myself, and thought others might wish for them also, I got them reprinted here in the form I sent you. . . . I have no compunction at all in reviving this Satire upon the old Banker, whom it is only paying off in his own Coin. Spedding (of course) used to deny that R. deserved his ill Reputation: but I never heard any one else deny it. All his little malignities, unless the epigram on Ward be his, are dead along with his little sentimentalities; while Byron’s Scourge hangs over his Memory. The only one who, so far as I have seen, has given any idea of his little cavilling style, is Mrs. Trench in her Letters; her excellent Letters, so far as I can see
and judge, next best to Walpole and Cowper in our Language. . . .
I have bought Regnard, of the old Molière times, very good; and (what is always odd to me) as French as the French of To-day: I mean, in point of Language.
[Nov. 1872.]
My dear Pollock,
In a late Box of books which I had from Mudie were Macmillan and Fraser, for 1869-1870. And in one of these—I am nearly sure, Macmillan—is an Article called ‘Objects of Art’ [145] which treats very well, I think, on the subject you and I talked of at Whitsun. . . .
My new Reader . . . has been reading to me Fields’ ‘Yesterdays with Authors,’ Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray. The latter seems to me a Caricature: the Dickens has one wonderful bit about Macready in 1869, which ought not to have been printed during his Life, but which I will copy out for you if you have not seen it. Hawthorne seems to me the most of a Man of Genius America has produced in the way of Imagination: yet I have never found an Appetite for his Books. Frederic Tennyson sent me Victor Hugo’s ‘Toilers of the Sea,’ which he admires, I suppose; but I can’t get up an Appetite for that neither. I think the Scenes being laid in the Channel Islands
may have something to do with old Frederic’s Liking. . . .
The Daily News only tells me of Crisises in France, Floods in Italy, Insubordination of London Policemen, and Desertion from the British Army. So I take refuge in other Topics. Do look for ‘Objects of Art’ among them.
Which are you for
Noi leggiavamo }
or } un giorno per diletto? [146a]
Noi leggevamo }
Woodbridge: Nov. 28 [1872].
‘Multæ Epistolæ pertransibunt et augebitur Scientia.’ Our one Man of Books down here, Brooke, [146b] had told me that the old Editions on the whole favoured ‘leggiavamo.’ Now I shall tell him that the Germans have decided on ‘leggevamo.’ But Brooke quotes one Copy (1502) which reads ‘leggevam,’ which I had also wished for, to get rid of a fifth (and superfluous) o in the line. I suppose such a plural is as allowable as
Noi andavam per lo solingo Piano, etc.
What is all this erudite Enquiry about? I was talking with Edwards one night of this passage, and of this line in particular, which came into my head as a motto for a Device [146c] we were talking of; and hence all this precious fuss.
But I want to tell you what I forgot in my last letter; what Dickens himself says of his ‘Holyday Romance’ in a letter to Fields.
July 25, 1867.
‘I hope the Americans will see the joke of Holyday Romance. The writing seems to me so much like Children’s, that dull folk (on any side of any water) might perhaps rate it accordingly. I should like to be beside you when you read it, and particularly when you read the Pirate’s Story. It made me laugh to that extent that my people here thought I was out of my wits: until I gave it to them to read, when they did likewise.’
One thinks, what a delightful thing to be such an Author! Yet he died of his work, I suppose.
Woodbridge, Jan, 5/73.
My dear Pollock,
I don’t know that I have anything to tell you, except a Story which I have already written to Donne and to Mrs. Kemble, all the way to Rome, out of a French Book. [147] I just now forget the name, and it is gone back to Mudie. About 1783, or a little later, a young Danseur of the French Opera falls in love with a young Danseuse of the same. She, however, takes up with a ‘Militaire,’ who indeed commands the Guard who are on
Service at the Opera. The poor Danseur gets mad with jealousy: attacks the Militaire on his post; who just bids his Soldiers tie the poor Lad to a Column, without further Injury. The Lad, though otherwise unhurt, falls ill of Shame and Jealousy; and dies, after bequeathing his Skeleton to the Doctor attached to the Opera, with an understanding that the said Skeleton is to be kept in the Doctor’s Room at the Opera. Somehow, this Skeleton keeps its place through Revolutions, and Changes of Dynasty: and re-appears on the Scene when some Diablerie is on foot, as in Freischütz; where, says the Book, it still produces a certain effect. I forgot to say that the Subject wished to be in that Doctor’s Room in order that he might still be near his Beloved when she danced.
Now, is not this a capital piece of French all over?
In Sophie Gay’s ‘Salons de Paris’ [148] I read that when Madlle Contat (the Predecessor of Mars) was learning under Préville and his Wife for the Stage, she gesticulated too much, as Novices do. So the Prévilles confined her Arms like ‘une Momie’ she says, and then set her off with a Scene. So long as no great Passion, or Business, was needed, she felt pretty comfortable, she says: but when the Dialogue grew hot, then she could not help trying to get her hands free; and that, as the Prévilles told her, sufficiently told her when Action should begin, and not till then, whether in Grave or Comic. This
anecdote (told by Contat herself) has almost an exact counterpart in Mrs. Siddons’ practice: who recited even Lear’s Curse with her hands and arms close to her side like an Egyptian Figure, and Sir Walter Scott, [149a] who heard her, said nothing could be more terrible. . . .
The Egyptian Mummy reminds me of a clever, dashing, Book we are reading on the subject, by Mr. Zincke, Vicar of a Village [149b] near Ipswich. Did you know, or do you believe, that the Mummy was wrapt up into its Chrysalis Shape as an Emblem of Future Existence; wrapt up, too, in bandages all inscribed with ritualistic directions for its intermediate stage, which was not one of total Sleep? I supposed that this might be a piece of ingenious Fancy: but Cowell, who has been over to see me, says it is probable.
I have brought my Eyes by careful nursing into sufficient strength to read Molière, and Montaigne, and two or three more of my old ‘Standards’ with all my old Relish. But I must not presume on this; and ought to spare your Eyes as well as my own in respect of this letter.
Woodbridge, Jan. /73.
My dear Pollock,
I have not been reading so much of my Gossip lately, to send you a good little Bit of, which I think may do you a good turn now and then. Give a look at ‘Egypt of the Pharaohs’ by Zincke, Vicar of a
Parish near Woodbridge; the Book is written in a light, dashing (but not Cockney pert) way, easily looked over. There is a supposed Soliloquy of an English Labourer (called ‘Hodge’) as contrasted with the Arab, which is capital.
Do you know Taschereau’s Life of Molière? I have only got that prefixed to a common Edition of 1730. But even this is a delightful serio-comic Drama. I see that H. Heine says the French are all born Actors: which always makes me wonder why they care so for the Theatre. Heine too, I find, speaks of V. Hugo’s Worship of Ugliness; of which I find so much in --- and other modern Artists, Literary, Musical, or Graphic. . . .
What, you tell me, Palgrave said about me, I should have thought none but a very partial Friend, like Donne, would ever have thought of saying. But I’ll say no more on that head. Only that, as regards the little Dialogue, [150] I think it is a very pretty thing in Form, and with some very pretty parts in it. But when I read it two or three years ago, there was, I am sure, some over-smart writing, and some clumsy wording; insomuch that, really liking the rest, I cut out about a sheet, and substituted another, and made a few corrections with a Pen in what remained, though plenty more might be made, little as the Book is. Well; as you like this little Fellow, and I think he is worth liking, up to a Point, I shall send you a Copy of these amended Sheets.
My dear Pollock,
7¼ p.m. After a stroll in mine own Garden, under the moon—shoes kicked off—Slippers and Dressing Gown on—A Pinch of Snuff—and hey for a Letter—to my only London Correspondent!
And to London have I been since my last Letter: and have seen the Old Masters; and finished them off by such a Symphony as was worthy of the best of them, two Acts of Mozart’s ‘Così.’ You wrote me that you had ‘assisted’ at that also: the Singing, as you know, was inferior: but the Music itself! Between the Acts a Man sang a song of Verdi’s: which was a strange Contrast, to be sure: one of Verdi’s heavy Airs, however: for he has a true Genius of his own, though not Mozart’s. Well: I did not like even Mozart’s two Bravuras for the Ladies: a bad Despina for one: but the rest was fit for—Raffaelle, whose Christ in the Garden I had been looking at a little before. I had thought Titian’s Cornaro, and a Man in Black, by a Column, worth nearly all the rest of the Gallery till I saw the Raffaelle: and I couldn’t let that go with the others. All Lord Radnor’s Pictures were new to me, and nearly all very fine. The Vandykes delightful: Rubens’ Daniel, though all by his own hand, not half so good as a Return from Hunting, which perhaps was not: the Sir Joshuas not first rate,
I think, except a small life Figure of a Sir W. Molesworth in Uniform: the Gainsboro’s scratchy and superficial, I thought: the Romneys better, I thought. Two fine Cromes: Ditto Turners: and—I will make an End of my Catalogue Raisonnée. . . .
I suppose you never read Béranger’s Letters: there are four thick Volumes of these, of which I have as yet only seen the Second and Third: and they are well worth reading. They make one love Béranger: partly because (odd enough) he is so little of a Frenchman in Character, French as his Works are. He hated Paris, Plays, Novels, Journals, Critics, etc., hated being monstered himself as a Great Man, as he proved by flying from it; seems to me to take a just measure of himself and others, and to be moderate in his Political as well as Literary Opinions.
I am hoping for Forster’s second volume of Dickens in Mudie’s forthcoming Box. Meanwhile, my Boy (whom I momently expect) reads me Trollope’s ‘He knew he was right,’ the opening of which I think very fine: but which seems to be trailing off into ‘longueur’ as I fancy Trollope is apt to do. But he ‘has a world of his own,’ as Tennyson said of Crabbe.
March 30/73.
My dear Pollock,
. . . You have never told me how you thought him [Spedding] looking, etc., though you told me
that your Boy Maurice went to sit with him. It really reminds me of some happy Athenian lad who was privileged to be with Socrates. Some Plato should put down the Conversation.
I have just finished the second volume of Forster’s Dickens: and still have no reason not to rejoice in the Man Dickens. And surely Forster does his part well; but I can fancy that some other Correspondent but himself should be drawn in as Dickens’ Life goes on, and thickens with Acquaintances.
We in the Country are having the best of it just now, I think, in these fine Days, though we have nothing to show so gay as Covent Garden Market. I am thinking of my Boat on the River. . . .
You say I did not date my last letter: I can date this: for it is my Birthday. [153] This it was that made me resolve to send you the Photos. Hey for my 65th year! I think I shall plunge into a Yellow Scratch Wig to keep my head warm for the Remainder of my Days.
* * * * *
In September 1863 Mr. Ruskin addressed a letter to ‘The Translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar,’ which he entrusted to Mrs. Burne Jones, who after an interval of nearly ten years handed it to Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, Professor of the History
of Fine Art in Harvard University. By him it was transmitted to Carlyle, who sent it to FitzGerald, with the letter which follows, of which the signature alone is in his own handwriting.
* * * * *
Chelsea, 14 April, 1873.
Dear FitzGerald,
Mr. Norton, the writer of that note, is a distinguished American (co-editor for a long time of the North American Review), an extremely amiable, intelligent and worthy man; with whom I have had some pleasant walks, dialogues and other communications, of late months;—in the course of which he brought to my knowledge, for the first time, your notable Omar Khayyam, and insisted on giving me a copy from the third edition, which I now possess, and duly prize. From him too, by careful cross-questioning, I identified, beyond dispute, the hidden ‘Fitzgerald,’ the Translator;—and indeed found that his complete silence, and unique modesty in regard to said meritorious and successful performance, was simply a feature of my own Edward F.! The translation is excellent; the Book itself a kind of jewel in its way. I do Norton’s mission without the least delay, as you perceive. Ruskin’s message to you passes through my hands sealed. I am ever your affectionate
T. Carlyle.
5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea,
18 April 1873.
Dear Norton,
It is possible Fitzgerald may have written to you; but whether or not I will send you his letter to myself, as a slight emblem and memorial of the peaceable, affectionate, and ultra modest man, and his innocent far niente life,—and the connexion (were there nothing more) of Omar, the Mahometan Blackguard, and Oliver Cromwell, the English Puritan!—discharging you completely, at the same time, from ever returning me this letter, or taking any notice of it, except a small silent one.
FitzGerald to Carlyle.
(Enclosed in the preceding.)
[15 April 1873.]
My dear Carlyle,
Thank you for enclosing Mr. Norton’s Letter: and will you thank him for his enclosure of Mr. Ruskin’s? It is lucky for both R. and me that you did not read his Note; a sudden fit of Fancy, I suppose, which he is subject to. But as it was kindly meant on his part, I have written to thank him. Rather late in the Day; for his Letter (which Mr. Norton thinks may have lain a year or two in his Friend’s Desk) is dated September 1863.
Which makes me think of our old Naseby Plans, so long talked of, and undone. I have made one more effort since I last wrote to you; by writing to the Lawyer, as well as to the Agent, of the Estate; to intercede with the Trustees thereof, whose permission seems to be necessary. But neither Agent nor Lawyer have yet answered. I feel sure that you believe that I do honestly wish this thing to be done; the plan of the Stone, and Inscription, both settled: the exact site ascertained by some who were with me when I dug for you: so as we can even specify the so many ‘yards to the rear’ which you stipulated for: only I believe we must write ‘to the East—or Eastward’—in lieu of ‘to the rear.’ But for this Change we must have your Permission as well as from the Trustees theirs.
I am glad to hear from Mr. Norton’s Letter to you that you hold well, through all the Wet and Cold we have had for the last six months. Our Church Bell here has been tolling for one and another of us very constantly. I get out on the River in my Boat, and dabble about my five acres of Ground just outside the Town. Sometimes I have thought you might come to my pleasant home, where I never live, but where you should be treated with better fare than you had at Farlingay: where I did not like to disturb the Hostess’ Economy. But I may say this: you would not come; nor could I press you to do so. But I remain yours sincerely, I assure you,
E. F. G.
P.S. Perhaps I had better write a word of thanks to Mr. Norton myself: which I will do. I suppose he may be found at the address he gives.
To C. E. Norton.
Woodbridge, April 17/73.
Dear Sir,
Two days ago Mr. Carlyle sent me your Note, enclosing one from Mr. Ruskin ‘to the Translator of Omar Khayyám.’ You will be a little surprized to hear that Mr. Ruskin’s Note is dated September 1863: all but ten years ago! I dare say he has forgotten all about it long before this: however, I write him a Note of Thanks for the good, too good, messages he sent me; better late than never; supposing that he will not be startled and bored by my Acknowledgments of a forgotten Favor rather than gratified. It is really a funny little Episode in the Ten years’ Dream. I had asked Carlyle to thank you also for such trouble as you have taken in the matter. But, as your Note to him carries your Address, I think I may as well thank you for myself. I am very glad to gather from your Note that Carlyle is well, and able to walk, as well as talk, with a congenial Companion. Indeed, he speaks of such agreeable conversation with you in the Message he appends to your Letter. For which thanking you once more, allow me to write myself yours sincerely,
Edward FitzGerald.
[5 May, 1873.]
Dear Pollock,
. . . I see that you were one of those who were at Macready’s Funeral. I, too, feel as if I had lost a Friend, though I scarce knew him but on the Stage. But there I knew him as Virginius very well, when I was a Boy (about 1821), and when Miss Foote was his Daughter. Jackson’s Drawing of him in that Character is among the best of such Portraits, surely. I think I shall have a word about M. from Mrs. Kemble, with whom I have been corresponding a little since her return to England. She has lately been staying with her Son-in-Law, Mr. Leigh, at Stoneleigh Vicarage, near Kenilworth. In the Autumn she says she will go to America, never to return to England. But I tell her she will return. . . .
My Eyes have been leaving me in the lurch again: partly perhaps from taxing them with a little more Reading: partly from going on the Water, and straining after our River Beacons, in hot Sun and East Wind; partly also, and main partly I doubt, from growing so much older and the worse for wear. I am afraid this very Letter will be troublesome to you to read: but I must write at a Gallop if at all. . . .
[1873.]
My dear Pollock,
. . . This is Sunday Night: 10 p.m. And what is the Evening Service which I have been listening
to? The ‘Eustace Diamonds’: which interest me almost as much as Tichborne. I really give the best proof I can of the Interest I take in Trollope’s Novels, by constantly breaking out into Argument with the Reader (who never replies) about what is said and done by the People in the several Novels. I say ‘No, no! She must have known she was lying!’ ‘He couldn’t have been such a Fool! etc.’
[1873.]
My dear Pollock,
. . . I am very shy of ‘The Greatest Poem,’ The Greatest Picture, Symphony, etc., but one single thing I always was assured of: that ‘The School’ was the best Comedy in the English Language. Not wittier than Congreve, etc., but with Human Character that one likes in it; Charles, both Teazles, Sir Oliver, etc. Whereas the Congreve School inspires no sympathy with the People: who are Manners not Men, you know. Voilà de suffisamment péroré à ce sujet-là. . . . I set my Reader last night on beginning The Mill on the Floss. I couldn’t take to it more than to others I have tried to read by the Greatest Novelist of the Day: but I will go on a little further. Oh for some more brave Trollope; who I am sure conceals a much profounder observation than these Dreadful Denners of Romance under his lightsome and sketchy touch, as Gainboro compared to Denner.
My dear Pollock,
Thank you for the Fraser, and your Paper in it: which I relished very much for its Humour, Discrimination, and easy style; like all you write. Perhaps I should not agree with you about all the Pictures: but you do not give me any great desire to put that to the test.
Max Müller’s Darwin Paper reminded me of an Observation in Bacon’s Sylva; [160] that Apes and Monkeys, with Organs of Speech so much like Man’s have never been taught to speak an Articulate word: whereas Parrots and Starlings, with organs so unlike Man’s, are easily taught to do so. Do you know if Darwin, or any of his Followers, or Antagonists, advert to this?
I have been a wonderful Journey—for me—even to Naseby in Northamptonshire; to authenticate the spot where I dug up some bones of those slain there, for Gurlyle thirty years ago. We are to put up a Stone there to record the fact, if we can get leave of the present Owners of the Field; a permission, one would think, easy enough to obtain; but I have been more than a Year trying to obtain it, notwithstanding; and do not know that I am nearer the point after all. The Owner is a Minor: and three Trustees must sanction the thing for him; and these three Trustees are all great People, all living in different
parts of England; and, I suppose, forgetful of such a little matter, though their Estate-agent, and Lawyer, represented it to them long ago.
I stayed at Cambridge some three hours on my way, so as to look at some of the Old, and New, Buildings, which I had not seen these dozen years and more. The Hall of Trinity looked to me very fine; and Sir Joshua’s Duke of Gloucester the most beautiful thing in it. I looked into the Chapel, where they were at work: the Roof seemed to me being overdone: and Roubiliac’s Newton is now nowhere, between the Statues of Bacon and Barrow which are executed on a larger scale. [161] And what does Spedding say to Macaulay in that Company? I never saw Cambridge so empty, but not the less pleasant.
[1873.]
My dear Pollock,
Two or three years ago I had three or four of my Master-pieces done up together for admiring Friends. It has occurred to me to send you one of these instead of the single Dialogue which I was looking in the Box for. I think you have seen, or had, all the
things but the last, [162] which is the most impudent of all. It was, however, not meant for Scholars: mainly for Mrs. Kemble: but as I can’t read myself, nor expect others of my age to read a long MS. I had it printed by a cheap friend (to the bane of other Friends), and here it is. You will see by the notice that Æschylus is left ‘nowhere,’ and why; a modest proviso. Still I think the Story is well compacted: the Dialogue good, (with one single little originality; of riding into Rhyme as Passion grows) and the Choruses (mostly ‘rot’ quoad Poetry) still serving to carry on the subject of the Story in the way of Inter-act. Try one or two Women with a dose of it one day; not Lady Pollock, who knows better. . . . When I look over the little Prose Dialogue, I see lots that might be weeded. I wonder at one word which is already crossed—‘Emergency.’ ‘An Emergency!’ I think Blake could have made a Picture of it as he did of the Flea. Something of the same disgusting Shape too. . . . Blake seems to me to have fine things: but as by random, like those of a Child, or a Madman, of Genius. Is there one good whole Piece, of ever so few lines? . . .
What do you think of a French saying quoted by Heine, that when ‘Le bon Dieu’ gets rather bored in Heaven, he opens the windows, and takes a look at the Boulevards? Heine’s account of the Cholera in France is wonderful.
My dear Pollock,
I am wondering in what Idiom you will one day answer my last. [163a] Meanwhile, I have to thank you for Lady Pollock’s Article on American Literature: which I like, as all of hers. Only, I cannot understand her Admiration of Emerson’s ‘Humble Bee’; which, without her Comment, I should have taken for a Burlesque on Barry Cornwall, or some of that London School. Surely, that ‘Animated Torrid Zone’ without which ‘All is Martyrdom,’ etc., is rather out of Proportion. I wish she had been able to tell us that ten copies of Crabbe sold in America for one in England: rather than Philip of Artevelde. Perhaps Crabbe does too. What do you and Miladi think of these two Lines of his which returned to me the other day? Talking of poor Vagrants, etc.,
Whom Law condemns, and Justice with a Sigh
Pursuing, shakes her Sword, and passes by. [163b]
There are heaps of such things lying hid in the tangle of Crabbe’s careless verse; and yet such things, you know, are not the best of him, the distressing Old Man! Who would expect such a Prettyness as this of him?
As of fair Virgins dancing in a round,
Each binds the others, and herself is bound—[163c]
so the several Callings and Duties of Men in Civilized Life, etc. Come! If Lady Pollock will write the Reason of all this, I will supply her with a Lot of it without her having the trouble of looking through all the eight volumes for it. I really can do little more than like, or dislike, Dr. Fell, without a further Reason: which is none at all, though it may be a very good one. So I distinguish Phil-osophers, and Fell-osophers; which is rather a small piece of Wit. And I don’t like the Humble Bee; and won’t like the Humble Bee, in spite of all the good reasons Miladi gives why I should; and so tell her: and tell her to forgive hers and yours always,
E. F. G.
To W. B. Donne.
Alde Cottage, Aldeburgh.
August 18, [1873].
My dear Donne,
There being a change of servants in Market Hill, Woodbridge, I came here for a week, bringing Tacitus [164] in my Pocket. You know I don’t pretend to judge of History: I can only say that you tell the Story of Tacitus’ own Life, and of what he has to tell of others, very readably indeed to my Thinking: and so far I think my Thinking is to be relied on. Some of the Translations from T. by your other hands read so well also that I have wished to get at
the original. But I really want an Edition such as you promised to begin upon. Thirty years ago I thought I could make out these Latins and Greeks sufficiently well for my own purpose; I do not think so now; and want good help of other men’s Scholarship, and also of better Eyes than my own.
I am not sure if you were ever at this place: I fancy you once were. It is duller even than it used to be: because of even the Fishing having almost died away. But the Sea and the Shore remain the same; as to Nero, in that famous passage [165] I remember you pointed out to me: not quite so sad to me as to him, but not very lively. I have brought a volume or two of Walpole’s Letters by way of amusement. I wish you were here; and I will wait here if you care to come. Might not the Sea Air do you good?
To T. Carlyle.
Woodbridge, Septr. 8/73.
My dear Carlyle,
Enclosed is the Naseby Lawyer’s answer on behalf of the Naseby Trustees. I think it will seem marvellous in your Eyes, as it does in mine.
You will see that I had suggested whether moving the Obelisk, the ‘foolish Obelisk,’ might not be accomplished in case The Stone were rejected. You see also that my Lawyer offers his mediation in the
matter if wished. I cannot believe the Trustees would listen to this Scheme any more than to the other. Nor do I suppose you would be satisfied with the foolish Obelisk’s Inscription, which warns Kings not to exceed their just Prerogative, nor Subjects [to swerve from] their lawful Obedience, etc., but does not say that it stands on the very spot where the Ashes of the Dead told of the final Struggle.
I say, I do not suppose any good will come of this second Application. The Trouble is nothing to me; but I will not trouble this Lawyer, Agent, etc., till I hear from you that you wish me to do so. I suppose you are now away from Chelsea; I hope among your own old places in the North. For I think, and I find, that as one grows old one returns to one’s old haunts. However, my letter will reach you sooner or later, I dare say: and, if one may judge from what has passed, there will be no hurry in any future Decision of the ‘Three Incomprehensibles.’
I have nothing to tell of myself; having been nowhere but to that Naseby. I am among my old haunts: so have not to travel. But I shall be very glad to hear that you are the better for having done so; and remain your ancient Bedesman,
E. F. G.
The Hill, Dumfries, N.B.
13 Sep., 1873.
Dear FitzGerald,
There is something at once pathetic and ridiculous and altogether miserable and contemptible in the fact you at last announce that by one caprice and another of human folly perversity and general length of ear, our poor little enterprize is definitively forbidden to us. Alas, our poor little ‘inscription,’ so far as I remember it, was not more criminal than that of a number on a milestone; in fact the whole adventure was like that of setting up an authentic milestone in a tract of country (spiritual and physical) mournfully in want of measurement; that was our highly innocent offer had the unfortunate Rulers of the Element in that quarter been able to perceive it at all! Well; since they haven’t, one thing at least is clear, that our attempt is finished, and that from this hour we will devoutly give it up. That of shifting the now existing pyramid from Naseby village and rebuilding it on Broadmoor seems to me entirely inadmissible;—and in fact unless you yourself should resolve, which I don’t counsel, on marking, by way of foot-note, on the now existing pyramid, accurately how many yards off and in what direction the real battle ground lies from it, there is nothing visible to me which can without ridiculous impropriety be done.
The trouble and bother you have had with all this, which I know are very great, cannot be repaid you, dear old friend, except by my pious thankfulness, which
I can well assure you shall not be wanting. But actual money, much or little, which the surrounding blockheads connected with this matter have first and last cost you, this I do request that you will accurately sum up that I may pay the half of it, as is my clear debt and right. This I do still expect from you; after which Finis upon this matter for ever and a day. . . .
Good be ever with you, dear FitzGerald,
I am and remain Yours truly
(Signed) T. Carlyle.
To W. F. Pollock.
[16 Dec. 1873.]
. . . What do you think I am reading? Voltaire’s ‘Pucelle’: the Epic he was fitted for. It is poor in Invention, I think: but wonderful for easy Wit, and the Verse much more agreeable to me than the regularly rhymed Alexandrines. I think Byron was indebted to it in his Vision of Judgment, and Juan: his best works. There are fine things too: as when Grisbourdon suddenly slain tells his Story to the Devils in Hell where he unexpectedly makes his Appearance,
Et tout l’Enfer en rit d’assez bon cœur.
This is nearer the Sublime, I fancy, than anything in the Henriade. And one Canto ends:
J’ai dans mon temps possédé des maîtresses,
Et j’aime encore à retrouver mon cœur—
is very pretty in the old Sinner. . . .
I am engaged in preparing to depart from these dear Rooms where I have been thirteen years, and don’t know yet where I am going. [169]
To John Allen.
Grange Farm: Woodbridge
Febr: 21/74.
My dear Allen,
While I was reading a volume of Ste. Beuve at Lowestoft a Fortnight ago, I wondered if you got on with him; j’avais envie de vous écrire une petite Lettre à ce sujet: but I let it go by. Now your Letter comes; and I will write: only a little about S. B. however, only that: the Volume I had with me was vol. iii. of my Edition (I don’t know if yours is the same), and I thought you [would] like all of three Causeries in it: Rousseau, Frederick the Great, and Daguesseau: the rest you might not so much care for: nor I neither.
Hare’s Spain was agreeable to hear read: I have forgot all about it. His ‘Memorials’ were insufferably
tiresome to me. You don’t speak of Tichborne, which I never tire of: only wondering that the Lord Chief Justice sets so much Brains to work against so foolish a Bird. [170] The Spectator on Carlyle is very good, I think. As to Politics I scarce meddle with them. I have been glad to revert to Don Quixote, which I read easily enough in the Spanish: it is so delightful that I don’t grudge looking into a Dictionary for the words I forget. It won’t do in English; or has not done as yet: the English colloquial is not the Spanish do. It struck me oddly that—of all things in the world!—Sir Thomas Browne’s Language might suit.
They now sell at the Railway Stalls Milnes’ Life of Keats for half a crown, as well worth the money as any Book. I would send you a Copy if you liked: as I bought three or four to give away.
You may see that I have changed my Address: obliged to leave the Lodging where I had been thirteen years: and to come here to my own house, while another Lodging is getting ready, which I doubt I shall not inhabit, as it will entail Housekeeping on me. But I like to keep my house for my Nieces: it is not my fault they do not make it their home.
Ever yours, E. F. G.
Grange Farm, Woodbridge.
February 26/74.
My dear Laurence,
. . . I am not very solicitous about the Likeness [171] as I might be of some dear Friend; but I was willing to have a Portrait of the Poet whom I am afraid I read more than any other of late and with whose Family (as you know) I am kindly connected. The other Portrait, which you wanted to see, and I hope have not seen, is by Phillips; and just represents what I least wanted, Crabbe’s company look; whereas Pickersgill represents the Thinker. So I fancy, at least.
Little Grange, Woodbridge.
[July 4/74.]
My dear Laurence,
. . . I am (for a wonder) going out on a few days’ visit. . . . And, once out, I meditate a run to Edinburgh, only to see where Sir Walter Scott lived and wrote about. But as I have meditated this great Enterprize for these thirty years, it may perhaps now end again in meditation only. . . .
I am just finishing Forster’s Dickens: very good, I think: only, he has no very nice perception of Character, I think, or chooses not to let his readers into it. But there is enough to show that Dickens
was a very noble fellow as well as a very wonderful one. . . . I, for one, worship Dickens, in spite of Carlyle and the Critics: and wish to see his Gadshill as I wished to see Shakespeare’s Stratford and Scott’s Abbotsford. One must love the Man for that.
To W. F. Pollock.
Little Grange, Woodbridge.
July 23, [1874].
But I did get to Abbotsford, and was rejoiced to find it was not at all Cockney, not a Castle, but only in the half-castellated style of heaps of other houses in Scotland; the Grounds simply and broadly laid out before the windows, down to a field, down to the Tweed, with the woods which he left so little, now well aloft and flourishing, and I was glad. I could not find my way to Maida’s Grave in the Garden, with its false Quantity,
Ad jănuam Domini, etc.
which the Whigs and Critics taunted Scott with, and Lockhart had done it. ‘You know I don’t care a curse about what I write’; nor about what was imputed to him. In this, surely like Shakespeare: as also in other respects. I will worship him, in spite of Gurlyle, who sent me an ugly Autotype of Knox whom I was to worship instead.
Then I went to see Jedburgh [172] Abbey, in a half ruined corner of which he lies entombed—Lockhart
beside him—a beautiful place, with his own Tweed still running close by, and his Eildon Hills looking on. The man who drove me about showed me a hill which Sir Walter was very fond of visiting, from which he could see over the Border, etc. This hill is between Abbotsford and Jedburgh: [173] and when his Coach horses, who drew his Hearse, got there, to that hill, they could scarce be got on.
My mission to Scotland was done; but some civil pleasant people, whom I met at Abbotsford, made me go with them (under Cook’s guidance) to the Trossachs, Katrine, Lomond, etc., which I did not care at all about; but it only took a day. After which, I came in a day to London, rather glad to be in my old flat land again, with a sight of my old Sea as we came along.
And in London I went to see my dear old Donne, because of wishing to assure myself, with my own eyes, of his condition; and I can safely say he looked better than before his Illness, near two years ago. He had a healthy colour; was erect, alert, and with his old humour, and interest in our old topics. . . .
I looked in at the Academy, as poor a show as ever I had seen, I thought; only Millais attracted me: a Boy with a red Sash: and that old Seaman with his half-dreaming Eyes while the Lassie reads to him. I had no Catalogue: and so thought the Book was—The Bible—to which she was drawing his thoughts, while the sea-breeze through the open
Window whispered of his old Life to him. But I was told afterwards (at Donne’s indeed) that it was some account of a N. W. Passage she was reading. The Roll Call I could not see, for a three deep file of worshippers before it: I only saw the ‘hairy Cap’ as Thackeray in his Ballad, [174] and I supposed one would see all in a Print as well as in the Picture. But the Photo of Miss Thompson herself gives me a very favourable impression of her. It really looks, in face and dress, like some of Sir Joshua’s Women. . . .
Another Miss Austen! Of course under Spedding’s Auspices, the Father of Evil.
From W. H. Thompson to W. A. Wright.
On 17 July 1883, shortly after FitzGerald’s death, the late Master of Trinity wrote to me from Harrogate, ‘As regards FitzGerald’s letters, I have preserved a good many, which I will look through when we return to College. I have a long letter from Carlyle to him, which F. gave me. It is a Carlylesque étude on Spedding, written from dictation by his niece, but signed by the man himself in a breaking hand. The thing is to my mind more characteristic of T. Carlyle than of James Spedding—that “victorious man” as C. calls him. He seems unaware of one distinguishing feature of J. S.’s mind—its subtlety of perception—and the excellence of his English style escapes his critic, whose notices on that subject by the bye would not necessarily command assent.’
5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea
6 Nov. 1874.
Dear FitzGerald,
Thanks for your kind little Letter. I am very glad to learn that you are so cheerful and well, entering the winter under such favourable omens. I lingered in Scotland, latterly against my will, for about six weeks: the scenes there never can cease to be impressive to me; indeed as natural in late visits they are far too impressive, and I have to wander there like a solitary ghost among the graves of those that are gone from me, sad, sad, and I always think while there, ought not this visit to be the last?
But surely I am well pleased with your kind affection for the Land, especially for Edinburgh and the scenes about it. By all means go again to Edinburgh (tho’ the old city is so shorn of its old grim beauty and is become a place of Highland shawls and railway shriekeries); worship Scott, withal, as vastly superior to the common run of authors, and indeed grown now an affectingly tragic man. Don’t forget Burns either and Ayrshire and the West next time you go; there are admirable antiquities and sceneries in those parts, leading back (Whithorn for example, Whitterne or candida casa) to the days of St. Cuthbert; not to speak of Dumfries with Sweetheart Abbey and the brooks and hills a certain friend of yours first opened his eyes to in this astonishing world.
I am what is called very well here after my return, worn weak as a cobweb, but without bodily ailment
except the yearly increasing inability to digest food; my mind, too, if usually mournful instead of joyful, is seldom or never to be called miserable, and the steady gazing into the great unknown, which is near and comes nearer every day, ought to furnish abundant employment to the serious soul. I read, too; that is my happiest state, when I can get good books, which indeed I more and more rarely can.
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; of an opulent and even magnificent intellect, but all in the magnificent prose vein. Nothing or almost nothing of the ‘melodies eternal’ to be traced in him. Spedding’s Book will last as long as there is any earnest memory held of Bacon, or of the age of James VI., upon whom as upon every stirring man in his epoch Spedding has shed new veritable illumination; in almost the whole of which I perfectly coincided with Spedding. In effect I walked up to the worthy man’s house, whom I see but little, to tell him all this; and that being a miss, I drove up, Spedding having by request called here and missed me, but hitherto we have not met; and Spedding I doubt not could contrive to dispense with my eulogy. There
is a grim strength in Spedding, quietly, very quietly invincible, which I did not quite know of till this Book; and in all ways I could congratulate the indefatigably patient, placidly invincible and victorious Spedding.
Adieu, dear F. I wish you a right quiet and healthy winter, and beg to be kept in memory as now probably your oldest friend.
Ever faithfully yours, dear F.,
T. Carlyle.
To W. H. Thompson.
[9 Nov. 1874.]
My dear Master,
I think there can be no criminal breach of Confidence in your taking a Copy, if you will, of C[arlyle]’s Letter. Indeed, you are welcome to keep it:—there was but one Person else I wished to show it to, and she (a She) can do very well without it. I sent it to you directly I got it, because I thought you would be as pleased as I was with C.’s encomium on Spedding, which will console him (if he needs Consolation) for the obduracy of the World at large, myself among the number. I can indeed fully assent to Carlyle’s Admiration of Spedding’s History of the Times, as well as of the Hero who lived in them. But the Question still remains—was it worth forty years of such a Life as Spedding’s to write even so good an Account of a few, not the most critical, Years of English History, and to leave Bacon (I think) a little less well off than when S. began washing him: I
mean in the eyes of candid and sensible men, who simply supposed before that Bacon was no better than the Men of his Time, and now J. S. has proved it. I have no doubt that Carlyle takes up the Cudgels because he thinks the World is now going the other way. If Spedding’s Book had been praised by the Critics—Oh Lord!
But what a fine vigorous Letter from the old Man! When I was walking my Garden yesterday at about 11 a.m. I thought to myself ‘the Master will have had this Letter at Breakfast; and a thought of it will cross him tandis que le Prédicateur de Ste Marie soit en plein Discours, etc.’ . . .
If Lord Houghton be with you pray thank him for the first ébauche of Hyperion he sent me. Surely no one can doubt which was the first Sketch.
To Miss Anna Biddell.
12 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft.
Jan. 18/75.
Dear Miss Biddell,
I am sending you a Treat. The old Athenæum told me there was a Paper by ‘Mr. Carlyle’ in this month’s Magazine; and never did I lay out half-a-crown better. And you shall have the Benefit of it, if you will. Why, Carlyle’s Wine, so far from weak evaporation, is only grown better by Age: losing some of its former fierceness, and grown mellow without losing Strength. It seems to me
that a Child might read and relish this Paper, while it would puzzle any other Man to write such a one. I think I must write to T. C. to felicitate him on this truly ‘Green Old Age.’ Oh, it was good too to read it here, with the old Sea (which also has not sunk into Decrepitude) rolling in from that North: and as I looked up from the Book, there was a Norwegian Barque beating Southward, close to the Shore, and nearly all Sail set. Read—Read! you will, you must, be pleased; and write to tell me so.
This Place suits me, I think, at this time of year: there is Life about me: and that old Sea is always talking to one, telling its ancient Story.
Lowestoft. Febr. 2/75.
Dear Miss Biddell,
I am so glad (as the Gushingtons say) that you like the Carlyle. I have ordered the second Number and will send it to you when I have read it. Some People, I believe, hesitate in their Belief of its being T. C. or one of his School: I don’t for a moment: if for no other reason than that an Imitator always exaggerates his Model: whereas this Paper, we see, unexaggerates the Master himself: as one would wish at his time of Life. . . .
I ran over for one day to Woodbridge, to pay Bills, etc. But somehow I was glad to get back here. The little lodging is more to my liking
than my own bigger rooms and staircases: and this cheerful Town better (at this Season) than my yet barren Garden. One little Aconite however looked up at me: Mr. Churchyard (in his elegant way) used to call them ‘New Year’s Gifts.’
To E. B. Cowell.
12 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft.
Feb. 2/75.
My dear Cowell,
. . . I hope you have read, and liked, the Paper on the old Kings of Norway in last Fraser. I bought it because the Athenæum told me it was Carlyle’s; others said it was an Imitation of him: but his it must be, if for no other reason than that the Imitator, you know, always exaggerates his Master: whereas in this Paper Carlyle is softened down from his old Self, mellowed like old Wine. Pray read, and tell me you think so too. It is quite delightful, whoever did it. I was on the point of writing a Line to tell him of my own delight: but have not done so. . . .
I have failed in another attempt at Gil Blas. I believe I see its easy Grace, humour, 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 Colour, no Breadth, like my dear Don; whom I shall resort to forthwith.
Lowestoft, Sept. 22, [1878].
My dear Pollock,
You will scarce thank me for a letter in pencil: perhaps you would thank me less if I used the steel pen, which is my other resource. You could very well dispense with a Letter altogether: and yet I believe it is pleasant to get one when abroad.
I dare say I may have told you what Tennyson said of the Sistine Child, which he then knew only by Engraving. He first thought the Expression of his Face (as also the Attitude) almost too solemn, even for the Christ within. But some time after, when A. T. was married, and had a Son, he told me that Raffaelle was all right: that no Man’s face was so solemn as a Child’s, full of Wonder. He said one morning that he watched his Babe ‘worshipping the Sunbeam on the Bedpost and Curtain.’ I risk telling you this again for the sake of the Holy Ground you are now standing on.
Which reminds me also of a remark of Béranger’s not out of place. He says God forgot to give Raffaelle to Greece, and made a ‘joli cadeau’ of him to the Church of Rome.
I brought here some Volumes of Lever’s ‘Cornelius O’Dowd’ Essays, very much better reading
than Addison, I think. Also some of Sainte Beuve’s better than either. A sentence in O’Dowd reminded me of your Distrust of Civil Service Examinations: ‘You could not find a worse Pointer than the Poodle which would pick you out all the letters of the Alphabet.’ And is not this pretty good of the World we live in? ‘You ask me if I am going to “The Masquerade.” I am at it: Circumspice!’
So I pick out and point to other Men’s Game, this Sunday Morning, when the Sun makes the Sea shine, and a strong head wind drives the Ships with shortened Sail across it. Last night I was with some Sailors at the Inn: some one came in who said there was a Schooner with five feet water in her in the Roads: and off they went to see if anything beside water could be got out of her. But, as you say, one mustn’t be epigrammatic and clever. Just before Grog and Pipe, the Band had played some German Waltzes, a bit of Verdi, Rossini’s ‘Cujus animam,’ and a capital Sailors’ Tramp-chorus from Wagner, all delightful to me, on the Pier: how much better than all the dreary oratorios going on all the week at Norwich; Elijah, St. Peter, St. Paul, Eli, etc. There will be an Oratorio for every Saint and Prophet; which reminds me of my last Story. Voltaire had an especial grudge against Habakkuk. Some one proved to him that he had misrepresented facts in Habakkuk’s history. ‘C’est égal,’
says V., ‘Habakkuk était capable de tout.’ Cornewall Lewis, who (like most other Whigs) had no Humour, yet tells this: I wonder if it will reach Dresden.
To Mrs. W. H. Thompson.
Little Grange, Woodbridge.
Sept. 23, [1875].
Dear Mrs. Thompson,
It is very good of you to write to me, so many others as, I know, you must have to write to. I can tell you but little in return for the Story of your Summer Travel: but what little I have to say shall be said at once. As to Travel, I have got no further than Norfolk, and am rather sorry I did not go further North, to the Scottish Border, at any rate. But now it is too late. I have contented myself with my Boat on the River here: with my Garden, Pigeons, Ducks, etc.; a great Philosopher indeed! But (to make an end of oneself) I have not been well all the summer; unsteady in head and feet; the Beginning of the End, I suppose; and if the End won’t be too long spinning out, one cannot complain of its coming too soon. . . .
I had a kindly Letter from Carlyle some days ago: he was summering at some place near Bromley in Kent, lent him by a Lady Derby; once, he says, Lady Salisbury, which I don’t understand.
He had also the use of a Phaeton and Pony; which latter he calls ‘Shenstone’ from a partiality to stopping at every Inn door. Carlyle had been a little touched in revisiting Eltham, and remembering Frank Edgeworth who resided there forty years ago ‘with a little Spanish Wife, but no pupils.’ Carlyle would name him with a sort of sneer in the Life of Sterling; [184] could not see that any such notice was more than needless, just after Edgeworth’s Death. This is all a little Scotch indelicacy to other people’s feelings. But now Time and his own Mortality soften him. I have been looking over his Letters to me about Cromwell: the amazing perseverance and accuracy of the Man, who writes so passionately! In a letter of about 1845 or 6 he says he has burned at least six attempts at Cromwell’s Life: and finally falls back on sorting and elucidating the Letters, as a sure Groundwork. . . .
I have this Summer made the Acquaintance of a great Lady, with whom I have become perfectly intimate, through her Letters, Madame de Sévigné. I had hitherto kept aloof from her, because of that eternal Daughter of hers; but ‘it’s all Truth and Daylight,’ as Kitty Clive said of Mrs. Siddons. Her Letters from Brittany are best of all, not those from Paris, for she loved the Country, dear Creature; and now I want to go and visit her ‘Rochers,’ but never shall.
[1875.]
My dear Cowell,
. . . I told Elizabeth, I think, all I had to write about Arthur C. I had a letter from him a few days ago, hoping to see me in London, where I thought I might be going about this time, and where I would not go without giving him notice to meet me, poor lad. As yet however I cannot screw my Courage to go up: I have no Curiosity about what is to be seen or heard there; my Day is done. I have not been very well all this Summer, and fancy that I begin to ‘smell the Ground,’ as Sailors say of the Ship that slackens speed as the Water shallows under her. I can’t say I have much care for long Life: but still less for long Death: I mean a lingering one.
Did you ever read Madame de Sévigné? I never did till this summer, rather repelled by her perpetual harping on her Daughter. But it is all genuine, and the same intense Feeling expressed in a hundred natural yet graceful ways: and beside all this such good Sense, good Feeling, Humour, Love of Books and Country Life, as makes her certainly the Queen of all Letter writers.
Little Grange, Woodbridge, Suffolk.
(Post Mark Dec. 8.) Dec. 9/75.
My dear Sir,
Mr. Carlyle’s Niece has sent me a Card from you, asking for a Copy of an Agamemnon: taken—I must not say, translated—from Æschylus. It was not meant for Greek Scholars, like yourself, but for those who do not know the original, which it very much misrepresents. I think it is my friend Mrs. Kemble who has made it a little known on your wide Continent. As you have taken the trouble to enquire for it all across the Atlantic, beside giving me reason before to confide in your friendly reception of it, I post you one along with this letter. I can fancy you might find some to be interested in it who do not know the original: more interested than in more faithful Translations of more ability. But there I will leave it: only begging that you will not make any trouble of acknowledging so small a Gift.
Some eighty of Carlyle’s Friends and Admirers have been presenting him with a Gold Medal of himself, and an Address of Congratulation on his 80th Birthday. I should not have supposed that either Medal or Address would be much to his Taste: but, as more important People than myself joined in the Thing, I did not think it became me to demur. But I shall not the less write him
my half-yearly Letter of Good Hopes and Good Wishes. He seems to have been well and happy in our pretty County of Kent during the Summer.
Believe me, with Thanks for the Interest you have taken in my Libretti, yours sincerely, E. FitzGerald.
P.S. I am doing an odd thing in bethinking me of sending you two Calderon Plays, which my friend Mrs. Kemble has spoken of also in your Country. So you might one day hear of them: and, if you liked what came before, wish to see them. So here they are, for better or worse; and, at any rate, one Note of Thanks (which I doubt you will feel bound to write) will do for both, and you can read as little as you please of either. All these things have been done partly as an amusement in a lonely life: partly to give some sort of idea of the originals to friends who knew them not: and printed, because (like many others, I suppose) I can only dress my best when seeing myself in Type, in the same way as I can scarce read others unless in such a form. I suppose there was some Vanity in it all: but really, if I had that strong, I might have done (considering what little I can do) like Crabbe’s Bachelor—
I might have made a Book, but that my Pride
In the not making was more gratified. [187]
Do you read more of Crabbe than we his Countrymen?
To Miss Aitken. [188a]
Woodbridge. Dec. 9/75.
Dear Miss Aitken,
It is a fact that the night before last I thought I would write my half-yearly Enquiry about your Uncle: and at Noon came your Note. I judge from it that he is well. I think he will thrash me (as Bentley said [188b]) even now.
I must say I scarce knew what to do when asked to join in that Birthday Address. I did not know whether it would be agreeable to your Uncle: and of course I could not ask him. So I asked Spedding and Pollock, and found they were of the Party: so it did not become me to hesitate. I hope we were not all amiss.
But as to Agamemnon the King: I shall certainly send Mr. Norton a Copy, as he has taken the trouble to send across the Atlantic for it. But as to Mr. Carlyle, ‘c’est une autre affaire.’ It was not meant for any Greek Scholar, and only for a few not Greek, who I thought would be interested, as they have been, in my curious Version. Among these was Mrs. Kemble, who I suppose it is has praised it in a way that somehow gains ground in America. But your Uncle—a few years ago he would have been perhaps
a little irritated with it; and now would not, I feel sure, care to spend his Eyes over its sixty or seventy pages. He would even now think—but in Pity now—how much better one might have spent one’s time (though not very much was spent) than in such Dilettanteism. So tell him not quite to break his heart if I don’t put him to the Trial: but still believe me his, and, if you will allow me, yours sincerely,
E. FitzGerald.
Fragment of a Letter to Miss Biddell.
Dec. 1875.
Thank you for the paragraph about Shelley. Somehow I don’t believe the Story, [189] in spite of Trelawney’s Authority. Let them produce the Confessor who is reported to tell the Story; otherwise one does not need any more than such a Squall as we have late had in these Seas, and yet more sudden, I believe, in those, to account for the Disaster.
I believe I told you that my Captain Newson and his Nephew, my trusty Jack, went in the Snow to the Norfolk Coast, by Cromer, to find Newson’s Boy. They found him, what remained of him, in a Barn there: brought him home through the Snow by Rail thus far: and through the Snow by Boat to Felixstow, where he is to lie among his Brothers and Sisters, to the Peace of his Father’s Heart.
Woodbridge. Dec. 30/75.
My dear Laurence,