Part 3

“Why, sir,” said Doctor Johnson to Boswell, “you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” And Boswell, of course, responded Amen. “I can talk twice as much in London as anywhere else,” he remarked, with Boswellian simplicity. Possibly FitzGerald was less “intellectual” than the great luminary and his satellite; or perhaps his intellectuality, such as it was, ran less exclusively to talk.[3] At all events, he hated London as a place of residence; and even when he paid it a visit, he was always in such feverish and ludicrous haste to get away that he was sure to leave his calls and errands no more than half done. “I long to spread wing and fly into the kind clear air of the country,” he writes on one occasion of this sort. “I see nobody in the streets half so handsome as Mr. Reynolds of our parish.... A great city is a deadly plague.... I get radishes to eat for breakfast of a morning; with them comes a savor of earth that brings all the delicious gardens of the world back into one’s soul, and almost draws tears from one’s eyes.” In the mouth of a man of social position, University training, and independent fortune,--who had lived in Paris, and was only thirty-five years old,--language like this bespeaks a born rustic and recluse, not to say a philosopher. And such FitzGerald was.

Not that he craved a life in the wilderness (being neither a John the Baptist nor a René), or had any extraordinary appreciation of the beauties of nature, so called. There was little of Wordsworth or of Thoreau in his composition, or, if there was, it seldom found expression; but he detested crowds, was ill at ease in society, and having a bent toward homely solitude, was independent enough to follow it. It must seem queer to his old friends, he knew, but he preferred to “poke about in the country,” using his books, as ladies do their knitting work, to pass the time away. Here is one of his days, a day of “glorious sunshine:”--

“All the morning I read about Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on a bench in the garden: a nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun manfully not far off. A funny mixture all this: Nero, and the delicacy of spring; all very human, however. Then at half past one lunch on Cambridge cream cheese; then a ride over hill and dale: then spudding up some weeds from the grass: and then coming in, I sit down to write to you, my sister winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the most delightful little girl in the world chattering incessantly. So runs the world away. You think I live in epicurean ease: but this happens to be a jolly day: one isn’t always well, or tolerably good, the weather is not always clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity. But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it.”

Sometimes, it must be owned, he seemed not quite to approve of his own choice. “Men ought to have an ambition to stir and travel, and fill their heads and senses.” So he says once, in an unusual mood of something like penitence. Even then, however, he concludes, characteristically, “but so it is.” There speaks the real FitzGerald. He is what he is, what he was made: a man without ambition; a man incapable, from first to last, of taking himself seriously. He could never have said, as Tennyson did in his youth, and in effect for all his life, “I mean to be famous.” If FitzGerald meant to be anything,--which is doubtful,--he meant to be obscure. The wonder of it all is that his life was beautiful, his spirit sweet, and his posthumous reward celebrity.

He had little or none of the melancholy which so generally accompanies the union of exceptional powers with an enfeebled will and a comparative intellectual sterility. For one thing, he seems to have been spared the persecution of friends. As he expected little of himself, so they expected little of him. Unlike most men of a kindred sort--men of whom Gray and Amiel may stand as typical examples--he was left to go his own gait. Nobody wrote to him week after week, chiding him for his indolence and entreating him to produce a masterpiece. Happy man that he was, his youth had held out no promise of such production, and so his subsequent course was not clouded by the shadow of a promise unfulfilled. If he was down in the country letting the moss grow over him, why, it was only “old Fitz,” from whom nobody had ever looked for anything very different. So Thackeray, Tennyson, and the rest seem to have thought. And so thought the man himself. Life was worth living; oh yes; and he had “got hold of a good end of it;” but it was hardly a thing to disquiet one’s self about. He set little value upon time or money, and correspondingly little upon his own gifts. There were always hours enough, and more than enough, for the nothings he had to do; his income was sufficient; if it declined,--as it did,--it was no matter, he had only to reduce his expenditures; he never earned a penny, or considered the possibility of doing so; and withal, he was not made to write anything himself, but to please himself with the writings of others.

He was born of the school of Epicurus. His aim was to pass the time quietly; pitching his desires low, never overmuch in earnest, taking things as they came,--

“Crowning the present, doubting of the rest;”

“not a hero, not even a philosopher, but a quiet, humane, and prudent man;” cultivating no enthusiasm, and aiming at no perfection. For fifty years he seems to have been a consistent vegetarian. Like the master of his school,--whom he seldom or never mentions, and of whom he perhaps as seldom thought,--he subsisted mostly on bread, and drank wine sparingly. Such a diet gave him lightness of spirits, he said,--a better thing, surely, than any tickling of the palate.

With his liking for the country--in which, again, he was at one with his unrecognized master--went a strong and persistent preference for the society of common people. For correspondents he had always scholars and men of note, the best of his time, and many of them; for daily associates he chose a sailor, a village clergyman’s family, and an old woman or two. One of the greatest men he had ever known was his sailor, the captain of his yacht,--“my captain,” he calls him; “a gentleman of nature’s grandest type,” “fit to be king of a kingdom as well as of a lugger.” From Lowestoft he sends word to Laurence, the portrait painter, “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.” One who knew him at the time of his intimacy with Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet (fortunate Quaker, with Lamb and FitzGerald both writing letters to him!), describes him as living in a little cottage at Boulge, a mile from the village, on the edge of his father’s park, with no companion save a parrot and a Skye terrier. Such domestic duties as he did not attend to with his own hands were performed by an “old-fashioned Suffolk woman.” It was at this period that FitzGerald--then thirty-three years old--wrote to Barton, “I believe I should like to live in a small house just outside a pleasant English town all the days of my life, making myself useful in a humble way, reading my books, and playing a rubber of whist at night.” And it may be added that few men have ever come nearer to realizing their own dream.

The Hall was mostly unoccupied in those days, though “the great lady”--FitzGerald’s mother--would be there once in a while, and “would drive about in a coach of four black horses.” So says the son of the village rector, who adds that FitzGerald “used to walk by himself, slowly, with a Skye terrier.” The rector’s son (a grandson, by-the-bye, of the poet Crabbe) was rather afraid of his “grave, middle-aged” neighbor. “He seemed a proud and very punctilious man ... never very happy or light-hearted, though his conversation was most amusing sometimes.” On this last point we have also the testimony of his housekeeper, the “old-fashioned Suffolk woman” before mentioned. “So kind he was,” she says; “not never one to make no obstacles. Such a joking gentleman he was, too!” All his dependents, indeed, speak of his kindness. A boy of the village, who was employed to read to him in the evening during his later years, told Mr. Groome[4] “how Mr. FitzGerald always gave him plenty of plum cake, and how they used to play piquet together. Only sometimes a tame mouse would come out and sit on the table, and then not a card must be dropped.” “A pretty picture,” Mr. Groome calls it. And so say we.

As to the picture of FitzGerald’s manner of life taken as a whole, it will be thought “pretty” or not according to the prepossessions of the reader. To many it will seem in all respects amiable, a refreshment to read about. Why should a man not be what he was made to be? If he likes the heat of battle, let him fight, so that he does it fairly and with those who enjoy the same game. If another man cares not to be strenuous, but only to pass his day innocently, with pleasure to himself and harm to nobody else,--why, the world is big enough; let him be at liberty to sit in his corner and see the crowd go by.

“‘An hour we have,’ thou saidst. ‘Ah, waste it well.’”

And after all, the idler may reach the goal as soon as some who hurry. The race ought to be his who has trained hardest and run hardest; and it would be, perhaps, if the world were logically and properly governed; but things being as they are, the experience of mankind seems to show a measure of truth in the old Hebrew paradox, “The race is not to the swift.” Whether it is or not, the question had no particular interest for FitzGerald. His thoughts were not of winning a prize. His temperament had put him out of the competition. Temperament is fatality; and he was content to have it so. “It is not my talent,” he said, “to take the tide at its flow.” In his “predestined Plot of Dust and Soul” the vine of worldly prudence had never struck root.

He was peculiar in other ways. He was constitutionally a skeptic. Many things which he had been taught to believe seemed to him insufficiently established; improbable, if not incredible. The Master of Trinity wrote of him and of one of his dearest friends, “Two of the purest-living men among my intimates, FitzGerald and Spedding, were prisoners in Doubting Castle all their lives, or at least the last half of them.” The language is euphemistic. Some calamities are so deeply felt that it is natural to veil allusion to them under metaphor. His friends, the Master means to say, had lost their faith in the tenets of the English Church. “A great problem,” he pronounces it. And such it surely was: that two such men--“pure-living men!”--should doubt of matters which to so many bishops, priests, and deacons are the very certainties of existence. But so it is. Some men seem to be born for unbelief; and out of that number a few are so non-conformative, so perverse, or so honest as to live according to their lights. Concerning questions of this kind FitzGerald said little either in public or private. An unheroic, peace-loving man, who wishes to slip through the world unnoticed, naturally keeps some thoughts to himself, growing them, to borrow Keats’s phrase, in “a philosophic back-garden.” He reasoned about them, it would seem, in a quiet spirit, patient, perhaps half indifferent, being happily free from any corroding curiosity as to the origin and destiny of things. In that regard Nature had been good to him. What could not be known, he could get on without knowing. Why wear out one’s teeth in champing an iron bit? He spoke his mind, anonymously, in his translation of the Omar Khayyám quatrains,--which are perhaps rather more skeptical than the book of Ecclesiastes,--and once, at least, he shut the lips of a man whom he thought a meddler. The rector of Woodbridge, we are told by Mr. Groome, called on FitzGerald to express his regret at never seeing him at church. We may surmise that the “regret” was expressed in a rather lofty and dogmatic tone, a tone not unnatural, surely, in the case of one clothed with supernatural authority. “Sir,” said FitzGerald, whose fondness for clergymen’s society was one of his marked characteristics, “you might have conceived that a man has not come to my years without thinking much of these things. I believe I may say that I have reflected on them fully as much as yourself. You need not repeat this visit.”

His correspondence, by which mainly the world knows him, is full of interesting revelations. His whims and foibles, and his own gentle amusement over them; his bookish likes and dislikes, one as hearty as the other; his affection for his friends, whose weak points he could sometimes lay a pretty sharp finger on, notwithstanding, frankness being almost always one of an odd man’s virtues; his delight in the sea and in his garden (“Don’t you love the oleander? I rather worship mine,” he writes to Mrs. Kemble); his pottering over translations from the Spanish, the Persian, and the Greek (“all very well; only very little affairs:” he feels “ashamed” when his friend Thompson inquires about them); his music, wherein his taste was simple but difficult (he played without technique and sang without a voice, loving to “recollect some of ‘Fidelio’ on the pianoforte,” and counting it more enjoyable “to perform in one’s head one of Handel’s choruses” than to hear most Exeter Hall performances),--all these things, and many more, come out in his letters, which are never anything _but_ letters, written to please his friends,--and himself,--with no thought of anything beyond that. In them we see his life passing. He is trifling it away; but no matter. He might do more with it, perhaps; but _cui bono_? At the end of his summer touring he writes: “A little Bedfordshire--a little Northamptonshire--a little more folding of the hands--the same faces--the same fields--the same thoughts occurring at the same turns of road--this is all I have to tell of; nothing at all added--but the summer gone. My garden is covered with yellow and brown leaves; and a man is digging up the garden beds before my window, and will plant some roots and bulbs for next year. My parsons come and smoke with me.” What age does the reader give to the author of this paragraph, so full of afternoon shadows? He was thirty-five.

But if he was an idle fellow, careful for nothing, poor in spirit, contented to be the hindmost, devil or no devil, “reading a little, dreaming a little, playing a little, smoking a little,” doing whatever he did “a little,” he was not without a kind of faith in his own capacity. He knew, or believed that he knew, what he was good for. “I am a man of taste,” he said more than once. If he could not write poetry,--taste being only “the feminine of genius,”--he knew it when he saw it. He read books with his own eyes, not half so common or easy a trick as many would suppose. And having read a book in that unconventional way, it was by no means to be taken for granted that he would like it, though its author might be one of his dearest friends. And if he failed to like it, he seldom failed to say so. If he commended a book,--a new book, that is,--it was apt to be with a mixture of criticism. He cared little or nothing for flattery himself, and was magnanimous enough to assume (an enormous assumption) that literary workers in general were equally high-minded. If one friend sends another a book of his own writing, the best course for the second man is merely to acknowledge its receipt, unless he has some fault to indicate! This he sets down quite simply as his belief and ordinary practice. It was the more comfortable way for both parties, he thought. Perhaps he thought, too, that it was the more conducive to habits of truthfulness. (Others might conclude that its most immediate and permanent effect would be to discourage the circulation of authors’ copies.) If he considered Mr. Lowell’s odes to lack wings, he told Mr. Lowell so. If his taste was offended by the style of the “Moosehead Journal” (“too clever by half”), he told Mr. Lowell of that also. Why not? Great men did not resent truth-speaking, but were thankful for it. He was full of wonder and sorrow when he saw Tennyson--who had stopped at Woodbridge for a day to visit him, after a separation of twenty years--fretted by the “Quarterly’s” unfavorable comments. If Tennyson had lived an active life, like Scott and Shakespeare, he would have done more and talked about it less. He recalls Scott’s saying to Lockhart, “You know that I don’t care a curse about what I write;” and he believed that it was not far otherwise with Shakespeare. “Even old Wordsworth, wrapt up in his mountain mists, and proud as he was, was above all this vain disquietude.” If a man is not greater than the greatest things he does, the less said about him and them the better. His work should drop from him like fruit from a tree. Henceforth let the world look after it, if it is worth looking after. The tree should have other business.

To say that FitzGerald lived in accordance with his own doctrine in this regard is to say that he lived like a man of dignity and high self-respect,--like an old-fashioned man,--sometimes called a gentleman,--one is tempted to say: a man who would cut off his hand sooner than solicit a vote, or angle for a compliment, or whimper over a criticism. Old-fashioned he certainly was,--old-fashioned and conservative. He liked old books, old music, old places, old friends. The adjective is constantly on the point of his pen as a word of endearment: “old Alfred,” “old Thackeray,” “old Spedding”--“dear old Jem.” So, writing to Mrs. Kemble from the seacoast, he says, “Why it happens that I so often write to you from here, I scarce know; only that one comes with few books, perhaps, and the sea somehow talks to one of old things;” which was not an unhandsome tribute to an old friend, though the old friend was a woman. He was a “little Englander,” as the word is now. For a nation, as for an individual, great estates were, he thought, more a trouble than a blessing. “Once more I say, would we were a little, peaceful, unambitious, trading nation, like--the Dutch!” Men of taste are naturally conservatives and moderates.

Not that FitzGerald was too nice for the world he lived in. His carelessness about dress, his contentment with mean lodgings, and his liking for the plainest and homeliest service and companionship have already been touched upon. Even in the matter of reading, while he held pretty strictly to the classics (not meaning the Greek and the Latin in particular), he cherished one bit of freakishness: a great fondness for the “Newgate Calendar”! “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.” So he writes to his friend Allen, at fifty-six. And the passion remained with him, as most things do that are part of a man’s life at fifty odd; for fourteen years later he writes to Mrs. Kemble, as of a matter well understood among his friends: “I like, you know, a good murder; but in its place--

‘The charge is prepared; the lawyers are met-- The judges all ranged, a terrible show.’”[5]

It may be that on this point he was not so very eccentric. Certainly our newspaper editors give the general public credit for having a reasonably good appetite for capital cases. And FitzGerald’s weakness--if it was a weakness--is curiously matched by what we are told of another eminent translator, the man to whom we owe our English Plato and Thucydides. A shy student, Mr. Tollemache says, happened to sit next to Jowett at dinner, and having hard work to maintain the conversation, as such men often had, in Jowett’s unresponsive company, stumbled upon the subject of murder. “To his surprise the Master rose to the bait, mentioned some _causes célèbres_, and dropped all formality.” Naturally the young Oxonian was surprised; but when he spoke of the incident to a man who knew the Master of Balliol better than he, the latter said, “If you can get Jowett to talk of murders, he will go off like a house on fire.”

There is something of the savage ancestor in all of us. We are wrong, perhaps, to feel astonished that men of the cloister, studious men, never called upon to kill so much as a superfluous kitten, should find an agreeable excitement in a dramatic, second-hand tickling of certain half-dormant sensibilities. If it is ghastly good fun to read of murder in Scott or Dumas, why not in the “Newgate Calendar”? Who knows how many tender-hearted, white-handed scholars would enjoy the spectacle of a prize-fight, if only the amusement were a few shades more respectable in the public eye? And how long is it since we saw college men falling over one another in a mad rush to enlist for battle, every one in a fever of anxiety lest he should be too late, and so be debarred from the unusual pleasure of killing and being killed?

No! When FitzGerald called himself a man of taste, he did not mean to confess himself an intellectual prig, with a schoolmaster’s eye for petty failings and a super-refined disrelish for everything short of perfection. As for perfection, indeed, he did not much expect it, whether in human beings or in their works; and when he found it, he did not always like it. He thought some other things were better. He preferred genius to art: that is to say, he enjoyed high qualities, though accompanied by defects, better than lower qualities cultivated to a state of flawlessness. “The grandest things,” he believed, “do not depend on delicate finish.” Thus in poetry he admired a score of Béranger’s almost perfect songs, but would have given them all for a score of Burns’s couplets, stanzas, or single lines scattered among “his quite _im_perfect lyrics.” Burns had so much more genius, so much more inspiration. In the same way FitzGerald had little patience with some perfect novels,--with Miss Austen’s, to be more specific. They _were_ perfect; yes, he had no thought of denying that; but they did not interest him. Even Trollope’s were more to his mind, with all their caricature and carelessness. Miss Austen is “capital as far as she goes; but she never goes out of the parlor.” “If 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!” Cowell, he adds, reads Miss Austen at night after his Sanskrit studies. “It composes him, like gruel.”

There is no doubt of it, FitzGerald was old-fashioned, especially as a novel-reader. He doted on Clarissa Harlowe, “that wonderful and aggravating Clarissa Harlowe,” and he read Dickens. “A little Shakespeare--a cockney Shakespeare, if you will ... a piece of pure genius.” So he breaks out after a chapter of Copperfield. “I have been sunning myself in Dickens,” he says at another time. A pretty compliment that, for any man. It is good to hear his praise of Scott. Even those who can no longer abide that romancer themselves--for there are such, unaccountable as the fact may seem to happier men--may well feel a touch of warmth at FitzGerald’s fire. He read fiction--as he read everything else--for pleasure; and in English no other fiction pleased him so much, taking the years together, as Sir Walter’s. In 1871 he has been reading “The Pirate” again. He knows it is not one of the best, but he is glad to find how much he likes it; nay, that is below the mark, how he “wonders and delights in it.” “With all its faults, often mere carelessness, what a broad Shakespearean daylight over it all, and all with no effort.” He finished it with sadness, thinking he might never read it again.