Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

TENNYSON, FITZGERALD, CARLYLE, AND OTHER FRIENDS

By Dr. Warren, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and now Professor of Poetry

Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange, Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling Orb of change, And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see as there you sit Beneath your sheltering garden-tree And watch your doves about you flit, And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee, Or on your head their rosy feet, As if they knew your diet spares Whatever moved in that full sheet Let down to Peter at his prayers. ······· And so I send a birthday line Of greeting; and my son, who dipt In some forgotten book of mine With sallow scraps of manuscript, And dating many a year ago, Has hit on this, which you will take My Fitz, and welcome, as I know Less for its own than for the sake Of one recalling gracious times, When, in our younger London days, You found some merit in my rhymes, And I more pleasure in your praise. To E. FitzGerald (Tiresias and other Poems, p. 1).

Alfred Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald; In Memoriam and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; “The Eternal Yea” and “The Eternal No,” “the larger hope” and “the desperate sort of thing unfortunately at the bottom of all thinking men’s minds, made Music of”—few friendships, few conjunctions, personal or literary, could be more interesting or more piquant.

What adds to the interest of the friendship is that it remained so long unknown to the literary or the general world, and is even now, perhaps, only partially appreciated. Yet it subsisted for nearly fifty years. It was close and constant. Though, as time went on, the two friends met less and less often, it was maintained by a steady interchange of letters and messages. The letters were naturally more on FitzGerald’s side. Like most, though not perhaps quite all good letter-writers, FitzGerald was a great letter-writer. He was, as he often said, an idle man, and as he also said, he rather liked writing letters, “unlike most Englishmen (but I am Irish),” he added. Indeed, he seemed almost to prefer communication with his friends by letter to personal meetings, though these he enjoyed greatly when brought to the point.

Tennyson and FitzGerald were old friends, born in the same year, the notable year 1809. It is true that though they were at Cambridge together they were not then known to each other, except by sight. “I remember him there well,” said FitzGerald, speaking of Tennyson, “a sort of Hyperion.” They had many friendships, acquaintances, associations in common. Carlyle, Thackeray, Spedding, Merivale, Trench, W. H. Thompson, J. D. Allen, W. B. Donne, Brookfield, Cowell, Mrs. Kemble, Samuel Laurence, were known to them both. In their formative years they fell under the same influences, and read many of the same books. It was about 1835 that they became acquainted. They were brought together probably by their common and uncommon friend, James Spedding. They certainly met at his father’s house, Mirehouse, near Bassenthwaite Lake, in the spring of 1835.

Tennyson had begun writing “In Memoriam” a little before this, i.e. early in 1834, soon after his friend Hallam’s sudden death and sad home-bringing in the winter of 1833. He kept it on the stocks, as all know, for some seventeen years. It was published, at first anonymously, in 1850. The secret of its authorship was soon revealed, the poem found immediate acceptance and popularity. It became and has remained one of the most widely read poems in the language. In the meantime Tennyson, though not so famous as “In Memoriam” made him, had become well known through the 1842 volumes.

FitzGerald, on the contrary, was at that time quite unknown, except by his friendships, and to his friends. An Irishman, with the easygoing and dolce far niente qualities which so often temper the brilliant genius of that race, sufficiently provided with means, he was naturally inclined for a quiet and easy, not to say indolent life. He deliberately chose from the first the fallentis semita vitae. He had some literary ambitions, and he wrote a few early poems, one or two of rare promise and beauty. One gift in particular was his—not, it is true, always leading him to action, yet in its passive or dynamic form constant and abundant almost to excess—loyalty in friendship. Once and fatally, it led him to take or submit to a positive step. He had been the attached friend of Bernard Barton the Quaker poet, the friend of Charles Lamb. When Barton died, from a mistaken sense of duty, FitzGerald not only collected his poems, a task more pious than profitable, but afterward, having meanwhile hesitated and halted too long in offering himself to one who was his real love, married his daughter who was not this. He left her, not indeed as is sometimes said, on the morrow of the wedding, but after separations and repeated attempts—in town and country—at reunion, and lived, as he had done before, alone and somewhat drearily ever afterwards.

Speculation has busied itself about his unfortunate marriage. The briefest but also the best pronouncement is probably his own letter written at the time to Mrs. Tennyson:

31 Portland Street, London,
March 19th, 1858.

Dear Mrs. Tennyson—My married life has come to an end: I am back again in the old quarters, living as for the last thirty years—only so much older, sadder, uglier, and worse!—If people want to go further for the cause of this blunder, than the fact of two people of very determined habits and temper first trying to change them at close on fifty—they may lay nine-tenths of the blame on me. I don’t want to talk more of the matter, but one must say something.

The old life to which he returned was monotonous, recluse, unconventional. He spent most of his days in East Anglia, an unromantic region, yet not unbeautiful or wanting a charm of its own; in summer emerging into the sunshine, sitting on a chair in his garden as Tennyson’s poem paints him, or on another chair on the deck of his boat, coasting the shores, or sailing up and down the creeks and estuaries with which that country abounds; in winter crouching over the fire, and in either chair smoking and endlessly reading.

In the earlier part of his life he moved about from one home to another, though never very far. In 1860 he settled down at Woodbridge in Suffolk, a pleasant, old-fashioned, provincial town, a sort of East Anglian Totnes, where the Deben, like the more famous Dart, seems to issue from a doorway of close-guarding hills to meet the salt tide, and begins the last stage of its cheerful journey to the open sea.

Just before this, in January of 1859, FitzGerald printed a small edition of a translation of a poem by a Persian astronomer, who died about 1123 A.D. The whole production of this famous piece seemed almost an accident. FitzGerald had been introduced, some half-dozen years earlier, to the study of Persian by his friend Mr. E. B. Cowell, a brother East Anglian, then in business in Ipswich. Cowell, wishing to pursue his studies further and take a Degree, went in 1851 as a married and somewhat mature student to Oxford, and there, in the Bodleian Library, came on a rare MS. of the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.” It is a beautiful little volume, written upon parchment sprinkled with gold dust, in a fine black ink, with blue headings, gold divisions, and delicate Oriental illuminations in blue, gold, and green, at the beginning and the end, and is the earliest known MS. of the poem, dating from 1450 A.D. Of this he made a copy for FitzGerald, who kept it by him, and gradually produced a translation, if not rather a paraphrase. “I also amuse myself,” he wrote in December 1853, “with poking out some Persian which E. Cowell would inaugurate me with. I go on with it because it is a point in common with him and enables me to study a little together.”

In 1858 he had got his version into a shape somewhat to his mind, and sent it to Fraser’s Magazine. It was kept for about a year, when FitzGerald asked for it back, and had 250 copies printed early in 1859. He gave away a few and sent the rest to Quaritch.

What ensued is one of the curiosities of literature. FitzGerald did not expect any success or vogue for the work. True, he had toiled at it. “Very few People,” he said, “have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have; though certainly not to be literal.” And when he had finished he liked “to make an end of the matter by print.” But that was all. “I hardly know,” he added, “why I print any of these things which nobody buys.”

Quaritch, as FitzGerald expected, found no sale for Omar. He reduced the price from five shillings to one shilling, and then to one penny. Rossetti heard of it through Whitley Stokes, and showed it to Swinburne. They were attracted by it and bought sixpenny-worth. Quaritch raised his price to twopence. They carried off a few more, and the rest, a little later, were eagerly bought up at a guinea or more apiece. Yet the poem remained long known to very few. Quaritch published a second edition, again a small one, nine years later in 1868, and four years later still, a third small edition in 1872, and in 1879 a fourth edition, including Salámán and Absál. The third edition came out just about the time I was going to Oxford as an undergraduate, and it was then that I first heard of it through J. A. Symonds and H. G. Dakyns, who gave me in 1874 a copy which Symonds had presented to him, and which I still possess. Even at Oxford I found only a few, either graduates or undergraduates, who heeded it or knew anything about it. Professor Henry Smith was the only senior I can remember who spoke to me about it, telling me of the previous editions, and praising its merits one day as we turned it over together in Parker’s shop. But stealthily and underground it made its way. Edition followed edition, with increasing rapidity. Suddenly it became ubiquitously popular, and it is now certainly one of the best-known pieces of the kind in the language. Messrs. Macmillan put it, in 1899, after a dozen times reprinting it, into their Golden Treasury Series. They had to reprint three times in that year, and this edition has been in constant demand. But there are ever so many others. The poem has been reproduced in a hundred forms, both in England and America, illustrated, illuminated, decorated, annotated. A reprint of the first edition is once more sold for a penny. It has been translated into Latin verse. There is a Concordance to it. A whole literature has sprung up around it. An “Omar Khayyam Club” was founded in 1892. Pious pilgrimages have been made to the translator’s tomb, and Omar’s roses planted over it, and verses recited in celebration of both poet and poem.

Of all this immense vogue and success, as his letters show, FitzGerald himself never dreamed. Even when in 1885 Tennyson published, as the dedication of Tiresias and other Poems, the lines “To E. FitzGerald,” the translator of Omar was still, for most readers, “a veiled prophet.” To-day, when the poem has become one of the utterances of the century, lovers of paradox have even ventured to hint that instead of FitzGerald being known as the friend of Tennyson, Tennyson might be known hereafter as the friend of FitzGerald.

FitzGerald is certainly known on his own account. The publication of his letters by his loyal old friend, Dr. Aldis Wright, revealed the man himself to the world. The publication of Tennyson’s Life by his son aided the process. Every one will remember the part which FitzGerald plays there, beginning with the meeting at James Spedding’s house in the Lakes in 1835, his early enthusiastic admiration, when he fell in love both with the man and his poems, and then his ever-constant friendship, tempered by grumbling, and what appears sometimes almost grudging criticism. He became the friend, it must be remembered, not only of Alfred, but of the whole family, and especially of Frederick, the eldest brother. “All the Tennysons are to be wished well,” he says in a letter of 1845. Though he affected to think little of society and hated snobbery as much as Tennyson or his other friend Thackeray himself, he greatly admired the better qualities of the English gentry, and had even a kindly weakness for their foibles. When Frederick went to live in Italy he wrote: “I love that such men as Frederick should be abroad: so strong, haughty, and passionate.”

When FitzGerald first met Alfred, the poetic family was still living on at Somersby after their father’s death. He went there and fell in love with their mother, and with their mode of life, and with the region, where “there were not only such good seas, but such fine Hill and Dale among the Wolds as people in general scarce thought on.” It was characteristic of him that he used to say that Alfred should never have left Lincolnshire.

FitzGerald kept up the friendship mainly, as he did most of his friendships, by letter. In particular, he made a point of writing to the Alfred Tennysons twice a year, once in the summer and again about Christmas time. He addressed himself sometimes to the Poet himself, sometimes to Mrs. Tennyson, and in later days to their eldest son. To Frederick Tennyson, who went to live in Italy, as the readers of Dr. Aldis Wright’s volume will remember, he wrote a whole series of letters, many of them very long and full. Of all these letters—to his father, his mother, himself, and his uncle—the present Lord Tennyson has placed a collection in my hands for the purpose of this article. The story of the friendship which it is an attempt to sketch will best be told by pretty full quotations from them. Many of them, and indeed most of those to his father and mother, are now published for the first time.

FitzGerald did not always succeed, and indeed did not expect to succeed, in drawing a reply from Tennyson himself. In a letter written in the summer of 1860 to Mrs. Tennyson he makes a very amusing reference to this, and also throws some light on his own habits:

Thank old Alfred for his letter which was an unexpected pleasure. I like to hear of him and you once or twice in the year: but I know he is no dab at literature at any time, poor fellow. “Paltry Poet”—Let him believe it is anything but want of love for him that keeps me out of the Isle of Wight: nor is it indolence neither.—But to say what it is would make me write too much about myself. Only let him believe what I do say.

Their relations were always of this playful, intimate kind, resting on long acquaintance. If FitzGerald was amused by “Alfred,” Tennyson, on the other hand, was well used to his old friend’s humour. When we spoke about him, he dwelt, I recollect, on this particular trait, and told me, to illustrate it, the story which is now, I think, pretty well known, how, when some common acquaintance had bored them with talking about his titled friends, “Old Fitz,” as at last he took up his candle to go to bed, turned to Tennyson and said, quietly and quaintly, “I knew a Lord once, but he’s dead.”

When Tennyson spoke of Omar he said, what he has said in verse, that he admired it greatly:

Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well;
A planet equal to the sun
Which cast it.

But of course he was aware that it was by no means always faithful to the original. It is indeed a liberal, rather than a literal translation—how liberal, all know who have been at the pains to compare FitzGerald’s poem with any of the many literal versions to which it has given rise.

In quite the early Twickenham days, just after their marriage, he would invite himself to dine or stay with Tennyson and his wife, nay more, would ask to bring friends to see them, such as the Cowells and W. B. Donne. In 1854 he stayed at Farringford for a fortnight, a visit he always remembered, and often referred to, with pleasure. Together he and Tennyson worked at Persian. He also sketched, and botanized with the Poet. But he could not be got to repeat the visit; and indeed, as he said himself, it was the last of the kind he paid anywhere, except to Mrs. Kemble. When he reached London, just after this visit, he wrote to Tennyson:

60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
June 15th, 1854.

My dear Alfred—I called at Quaritch’s to look for another Persian Dictionary. I see he has a copy of Eastwick’s Gulistan for ten shillings: a translation (not Eastwick’s, however, but one quite sufficient for the purpose) can be had for five shillings. Would you like me to buy them and send them down to you by the next friend who travels your way: or will you wait till some good day I can lend you my Eastwick (which is now at Oxford)? I could mark some of the pieces which I think it might not offend you to read: though you will not care greatly for anything in it.

Oh, such an atmosphere as I am writing in!—Yours,

E. F. G.

I left my little Swedenborg at Farringford. Please keep it for me, as it was a gift from my sister.

The note of the letters is always the same—warm affection, deep underlying admiration and regard, superficial banter and play of humour, and humorous, half-grumbling criticism. When they met face to face, after being parted for twenty years, they fell at once into exactly the old vein. FitzGerald was surprised at this, but he need not have been. Both were the sincerest and most natural of men, and nothing but distance and absence had occurred to sever them.

From the first he had conceived an intense and almost humble-minded admiration for Alfred. One of his earliest utterances describes his feelings, and strikes, with his keen critical perception, the true note. “I will say no more of Tennyson,” he wrote, “than that the more I have seen of him, the more cause I have to think him great. His little humours and grumpinesses were so droll that I was always laughing,—I must, however say further, that I felt, what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of depression at times from the over-shadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own—I could not be mistaken in the universality of his mind.”

His descriptions in Euphranor, published some sixteen years later, of “the only living and like to live poet he had known,” tell the same tale. They speak of Tennyson’s union of passion and strength. “As King Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin he, though as a great Poet comprehending all the softer stops of human Emotion in that Register where the Intellectual, no less than what is called the Poetical, faculty predominated. As all who knew him know, a Man at all points, Euphranor—like your Digby, of grand proportion and feature....”

There was no one for whose opinion he had so much regard, grumble though he might, and criticize as he would. He had a special preference for the poems at whose production he had assisted, which he had seen in MS., or heard rehearsed orally. Toward the later poems his feeling was not the same. The following extracts are all equally characteristic:

Markethill, Woodbridge,
November 20th, 1861.

My dear old Alfred—It gives me a strange glow of pleasure when I come upon your verses, as I now do in every other book I take up, with no name of author, as every other person knows whose they are. I love to light on the verses for their own sake, and to remember having heard nearly all I care for—and what a lot that is!—from your own lips.

Markethill, Woodbridge,
December 14th, 1862.

My dear old Alfred—Christmas coming reminds me of my half-yearly call on you.

I have, as usual, nothing to tell of myself: boating all the summer and reading Clarissa Harlowe since. You and I used to talk of the Book more than twenty years ago. I believe I am better read in it than almost any one in existence now—No wonder: for it is almost intolerably tedious and absurd—But I can’t read the “Adam Bedes,” “Daisy Chains,” etc., at all. I look at my row of Sir Walter Scott and think with comfort that I can always go to him of a winter evening, when no other book comes to hand.

To Frederick Tennyson.

November 15th, 1874.

I wrote my yearly letter to Mrs. Alfred a fortnight ago, I think; but as yet have had no answer. Some Newspaper people make fun of a Poem of Alfred’s, the “Voice and the Peak,” I think: giving morsels of which of course one could not judge. But I think he had better have done singing: he has sung well—tempus silere, etc.

But his love for the man and his underlying belief in his opinion and genius never varied. “I don’t think of you so little, my dear old Alfred,” he wrote one day in the middle of their friendship, “but rejoice in the old poems and in yourself, young or old, and worship you (I may say) as I do no other man, and am glad I can worship one man still.”

His delight when he found that Alfred had really liked Omar was unusually naïf and keen. He forgot his grumbling, and wrote to Mrs. Tennyson:

To Mrs. Tennyson.

November 4/67.

To think of Alfred’s approving my old Omar! I never should have thought he even knew of it. Certainly I should never have sent it to him, always supposing that he would not approve anything but a literal Prose translation—unless from such hands as can do original work and therefore do not translate other People’s! Well: now I have got Nicolas and sent a copy to Cowell, and when he is at liberty again we shall beat up old Omar’s Quarters once more.

I’ll tell you a very pretty Book. Alfred Tennyson’s Pastoral Poems, or rather Rural Idylls (only I must hate the latter word) bound up in a volume, Gardener’s, Miller’s, Daughters; Oak; Dora; Audley Court, etc.

Oh the dear old 1842 days and editions! Spedding thinks I’ve shut up my mind since. Not to “Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud.” When I ask People what Bird says that of an evening, they say “The Thrush.”

I wish you would make one of your Boys write out the “Property” Farmer Idyll. Do now, pray.

E. F. G.

When he had first “discovered” Omar, and was beginning to work upon him, Tennyson (who was then finishing the early “Idylls of the King”) had been one of the first to whom he wrote. It is worth remembering that FitzGerald was then in deep depression. It was the middle of the sad period of his brief, unhappy married life. This had proved a failure in London. It was proving a failure now in the country. He wrote:

Gorlestone, Great Yarmouth,
July 1857.

My dear old Alfred—Please direct the enclosed to Frederick. I wrote him some months ago getting Parker to direct; but have had no reply. You won’t write to me, at which I can’t wonder. I keep hoping for King Arthur—or part of him. I have got here to the seaside—a dirty, Dutch-looking sea, with a dusty Country in the rear; but the place is not amiss for one’s Yellow Leaf. I keep on reading foolish Persian too: chiefly because of it’s connecting me with the Cowells, now besieged in Calcutta. But also I have really got hold of an old Epicurean so desperately impious in his recommendations to live only for To-day that the good Mahometans have scarce dared to multiply MSS. of him. He writes in little quatrains, and has scarce any of the iteration and conceits to which his people are given. One of the last things I remember of him is that—“God gave me this turn for drink, perhaps God was drunk when he made me”—which is not strictly pious. But he is very tender about his roses and wine, and making the most of this poor little life.

All which is very poor stuff you will say. Please to remember me to the Lady. I don’t know when I shall ever see you again; and yet you can’t think how often I wish to do so, and never forget you, and never shall, my dear old Alfred, in spite of Epicurus. But I don’t grow merrier.—Yours ever,

E. F. G.

In 1872 he was busy with the third edition of Omar, and wrote to consult Tennyson. The first edition had contained only seventy-five quatrains. The second was a good deal longer, containing one hundred and ten. The third was again shortened to one hundred and one:

Woodbridge, March 25th, 1872.

My dear Alfred—It would be impertinent in me to trouble you with a question about my grand Works. But, as you let me know (through Mrs. T.) that you liked Omar, I want to know whether you read the First or Second Edition; and, in case you saw both, which you thought best? The reason of my asking you is that Quaritch (Publisher) has found admirers in America who have almost bought up the whole of the last enormous Edition—amounting to 200 copies, I think—so he wishes to embark on 200 more, I suppose: and says that he, and his Readers, like the first Edition best: so he would reprint these.

Of course I thought the second best: and I think so still: partly (I fear) because the greater number of verses gave more time for the day to pass from morning till night.

Well, what I ask you to do is, to tell me which of the two is best, if you have seen the two. If you have not, I won’t ask you further:—if you have, you can answer in two words. And your words would be more than all the rest.

This very little business is all I have eyes for now; except to write myself once more ever your’s and Mrs. Tennyson’s,

E. F. G.

Another letter a little later refers to the same reprinting of Omar:

My dear Alfred—I must thank you, as I ought, for your second note. The best return I can make is not to listen to Mrs. Tennyson’s P.S., which bids me send another Omar:—for I have only got Omar the Second, I am sure now you would not like him so well as the first (mainly because of “too much”). I think he might disgust you with both.

So though two lines from you would have done more to decide on his third appearance (if Quaritch still wishes that), I will not put you to that trouble, but do as I can alone—cutting out some, and retaining some; and will send you the result if it comes into type.

You used to talk of my crotchets: but I am quite sure you have one little crotchet about this Omar: which deserves well in its way, but not so well as you write of it. You know that though I do not think it worth while to compete with you in your paltry poetical capacity, I won’t surrender in the critical, not always, at least. And, at any rate, I have been more behind the scenes in this little matter than you. But I do not the less feel your kindness in writing about it: for I think you would generally give £100 sooner than write a letter. And I am—Yours ever,

E. F. G.

The next year, in 1873, he wrote again, touching on the same theme and others:

Dear Mrs. Tennyson—I remember Franklin Lushington perfectly—at Farringford in 1854; almost the last visit I paid anywhere: and as pleasant as any, after, or before. I have still some sketches I made of the place: “Maud, Maud, Maud,” etc., was then read to me, and has rung in my ears ever after. Mr. Lushington, I remember, sketched also. If he be with you still, please tell him that I hope his remembrance of me is as pleasant as mine of him.

I think I told you that Frederick came here in August, having (of course) missed you on his way. The Mistress of Trinity wrote to me some little while ago, telling me, among other things, that she, and others, were much pleased with your son Hallam, whom they thought to be like the “Paltry Poet” (poor fellow).

The Paltry one’s Portrait is put in a frame and hung up at my château, where I talk to it sometimes, and every one likes to see it. It is clumsy enough, to be sure; but it still recalls the old man to me better than the bearded portraits[18] which are now the fashion.

But oughtn’t your Hallam to have it over his mantelpiece at Trinity?

The first volume of Forster’s Dickens has been read to me of a night, making me love him, up to 30 years of age at any rate; till then, quite unspoilt, even by his American triumphs, and full of good humour, generosity, and energy. I wonder if Alfred remembers dining at his house with Thackeray and me, me taken there, quite unaffected, and seeming to wish any one to show off rather than himself. In the evening we had a round game at cards and mulled claret. Does A. T. remember?

I have had my yearly letter from Carlyle, who writes of himself as better than last year. He sends me a Mormon Newspaper, with a very sensible sermon in it from the life of Brigham Young, as also the account of a visit to a gentleman of Utah with eleven wives and near forty children, all of whom were very happy together. I am just going to send the paper to Archdeacon Allen to show him how they manage these things over the Atlantic.

About Omar I must say that all the changes made in the last copy are not to be attributed to my own perverseness; the same thought being constantly repeated with directions, whether by Omar or others, in the 500 quatrains going under his name. I had not eyes, nor indeed any further appetite, to refer to the Original, or even to the French Translation; but altered about the “Dawn of Nothing” as A. T. pointed out its likeness to his better property.[19] I really didn’t, and don’t, think it matters what changes are made in that Immortal Work which is to last about five years longer. I believe it is the strong-minded American ladies who have chiefly taken it up; but they will soon have something wickeder to digest, I dare say.

I am going to write out for Alfred a few lines from a Finnish Poem which I find quoted in Lowell’s “Among my Books”—which I think a good Book. But I must let my eyes rest now.

In September 1876 a lucky chance brought Tennyson and himself face to face again after twenty years. The Poet was travelling with his son, and together they visited him at Woodbridge. They found him, as Tennyson describes, in his garden at Little Grange. He was delighted to see them, and specially pleased with the son’s relation and attitude to his father.

Together he and Tennyson walked about the garden and talked as of old. When Tennyson complained of the multitude of poems which were sent him, Old Fitz recommended him to imitate Charles Lamb and throw them into his neighbour’s cucumber frames. Tennyson noticed a number of small sunflowers, with a bee half-dying—probably from the wet season—on each, “Like warriors dying on their shields, Fitz,” he said. He reverted, of course, to his favourite Crabbe, and told the story of how Crabbe (when he was a chaplain in the country) felt an irresistible longing to see the sea, mounted a horse suddenly, rode thirty miles to the coast, saw it, and rode back comforted.

FitzGerald did not compliment them on their looks, because, he said, he had always noticed men said, “How well you are looking!” whenever you were going to be very ill. Therefore he had ceased saying it to any one. He told, too, a story of a vision, how he had one day clearly seen from outside his sister and her children having tea round the table in his dining-room. He then saw his sister quietly withdraw from the room, so as not to disturb the children. At that moment she died in Norfolk.[20]

He wrote shortly after this visit to Tennyson:

Little Grange, Woodbridge,
October 31st, 1876.

My dear Alfred—I am reading delightful Boccacio through once more, escaping to it from the Eastern Question as the company he tells of from the Plague. I thought of you yesterday when I came to the Theodore and Honoria story, and read of Teodoro “un mezzo meglio per la pineta entrato”—“More than a Mile immersed within the wood,” as you used to quote from Glorious John. This Decameron must be read in its Italian, as my Don in his Spanish: the language fits either so exactly. I am thinking of trying Faust in German, with Hayward’s Prose Translation. I never could take to it in any Shape yet: and—don’t believe in it: which I suppose is a piece of Impudence.

But neither this, nor The Question are you called on to answer—much use if I did call. But I am—always yours,

E. F. G.

When I thought of you and Boccacio, I was sitting in the Sun on that same Iron Seat with the pigeons about us, and the Trees still in Leaf.

One of the poems after 1842 which he liked was the “Ode on the Duke of Wellington,” though characteristically he made a somewhat fastidious criticism on the “vocalization” of the opening.

“I mumble over your old verses in my memory as often as any one’s,” he wrote, “and was lately wishing you had found bigger vowels for the otherwise fine opening of the Duke’s Funeral:

’Twas at the Royal Feast for Persia won, etc.
(Dryden.)
Bury the great Duke, etc.
(A. T.)

So you see I am always the same crotchetty

Fitz.”

The paradox is that it was FitzGerald who was always urging “Alfred” to go on, and finding fault with him for not doing more, and not singing in grander, sterner strains,—not becoming the Tyrtaeus of his country. In truth, Tennyson’s strength and physical force and his splendid appearance in youth, added to his mental grandeur, seem to have deeply impressed his youthful contemporaries. He was, they felt, heroic, and made for heroic songs and deeds. When he did go on, in his own way, FitzGerald did not like it, or only half liked it. For Tennyson did go forward on his own lines. He had not a little to daunt and deter him. He, too, had his sensitiveness and capacity for feeling and passion not less exquisite than FitzGerald’s own. FitzGerald said his friendships were more like loves. He was not alone in this attitude. “What passions our friendships were,” wrote Thackeray, another of the set, the early friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. But of no friendship could such language be used more truly than of that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. When, however, the sundering blow fell, and the friendship which was a love lay shattered, Tennyson braced himself and went on. For

It becomes no man to nurse despair,
But in the teeth of clench’d antagonisms
To follow up the worthiest till he die.

His faith, even to the last, was still at times dashed with doubt, for, with “the universality of his mind,” he could not help seeing many sides of a question. But he “followed the Gleam,” as he has himself described. FitzGerald did the opposite. He drifted, he dallied, he delayed, he despaired. He ruined his own life in great measure by his marriage. His early ambitions seemed to wither prematurely, and he let his career slide. Yet he was always, as Mr. A. C. Benson has excellently brought out, admirable in his sincerity, his friendly kindliness, his innocence, his conscientious adherence to his literary standards. Too much has been made of his unconventionality, his slovenliness and slackness, his love of low or common company. He remained a gentleman and a man of business. Thackeray, a man of the world, when he was starting for America, wanted to leave him the legal guardian of his daughters. He was an Epicurean, not a Pyrrhonist. He took life seriously. He showed at times an austerity of spirit which was surprising. His Omar has often, and naturally, been compared to Lucretius and to Ecclesiastes. There is probably more of Lucretius about the poem, but more of Ecclesiastes about the translator.

There is another Epicurean, with whose tenets he might have been thought to show even more sympathy—the easy-going poet-critic Horace. Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam is the constant burden of FitzGerald’s strain. His friendship, early formed, with Tennyson, the contrast of their divergent views, might be compared with the friendship of Horace and Virgil. For Virgil, too, began as an Epicurean. But FitzGerald was not content with Horace. “Why is it,” he wrote, “that I can never take up with Horace, so sensible, agreeable, elegant, and sometimes even grand?” It was, perhaps, just that masculine and worldly element that put him off. Yet he not seldom quotes Horace, and perhaps liked him better than he knew. “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,” he wrote in a copy of Polonius which he gave to a special friend, and Nature was what he was always seeking in poetry. Still he preferred Virgil, just as he really preferred Tennyson.

Though he was destined to produce a poem which bids as fair for immortality as any of its time, he did not think highly of his own powers as a poet. But he did plume himself on being a critic. “I pretend to no Genius,” he said, “but to Taste, which according to my aphorism is the feminine of Genius.” This was another gift in common. Tennyson was himself a consummate critic, as FitzGerald was the first to recognize.

FitzGerald had his limitations and his prejudices—his “crotchets.” He did not like many even of those whom the world has agreed to admire. He did not like Euripides or even Homer. With Goethe’s poems he could not get on. He eschewed Victor Hugo. He liked, indeed, very little of the prose and none of the poetry of his contemporaries, except that of the Tennysons. He could not away with Browning. Arnold, he wrote down “a pedant.” He thought very little of Rossetti and Swinburne, though the former, especially, was a great admirer not only of Omar but of Jami and some of the Spanish translations. He tried to read Morris’s Jason, but said, “No go.” He “could not read the Adam Bedes and the Daisy Chains.” All this must be remembered when we read his criticism of Tennyson’s later work which belonged to the period of these writers and their productions. But within certain limits he was a very fine critic. It cannot be said of him as of his special favourite among Greek poets, Sophocles, that

He saw life steadily and saw it whole.

As he was aware himself, he by no means saw it whole. But with his detachment and his critical gift, it may, perhaps, be said:

He saw life lazily, but saw it plain.

To the question of Browning’s merits, or want of merits, he is always returning. A very characteristic letter is a long, discursive one, written to Tennyson himself in 1867:

Markethill, Woodbridge,
November 3rd, 1867.

My dear old Alfred—I abuse Browning myself; and get others to abuse him; and write to you about it; for the sake of easing my own heart—not yours. Why is it (as I asked Mrs. Tennyson) that, while the Magazine critics are belauding him, not one of the men I know, who are not inferior to the writers in the Athenæum, Edinburgh, etc., can endure, and (for the most part) can read him at all? I mean his last poem. Thus it has been with the Cowells, Trinity Thompsons, Donnes, and some others whom you don’t know, but in whose candour and judgment I have equal confidence, men and women too.

Since I wrote to your wife, Pollock, a great friend of Browning’s, writes to me. “I agree with you about Browning and A. T. I can’t understand it. Ter conatus eram to get through the Ring and the Book—and failing to perform the feat in its totality, I have stooped to the humiliation to point out extracts for me (they having read it all quite through three times) and still could not do it. So I pretend to have read it, and let Browning so suppose when I talk to him about it. But don’t you be afraid”? (N.B. I am not, only angry) “things will come round, and A. T. will take his right place again, and R. B. will have all the honours due to his learning, wit and philosophy.”

Then I had the curiosity to ask Carlyle in my yearly letter to him. He also is, or was, a friend of B.’s, and used to say that he looked on him as a sort of light-cavalry man to follow you. Well, Carlyle writes, “Browning’s book I read—insisted on reading: it is full of talent, of energy, and effort, but totally without backbone, or basis of common sense. I think among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted man.” (Italics are his.)

Who, then, are the people that write the nonsense in the Reviews? I believe the reason at the bottom is that R. B. is a clever London diner-out, etc., while A. T. holds aloof from the newspaper men, etc. “Long life to him!” But I don’t understand why Venables, or some of the men who think as I do, and wield trenchant pens in high places, why they don’t come out, and set all this right. I only wish I could do it: but I can only see the right thing, but not prove it to others. “I do not like you, Dr. Fell,” etc.

I found a Memorandum the other day (I can’t now light on it) of a Lincolnshire story about “Haxey Wood” or “Haxey Hood”—which—if I had not told it to you, but left it as by chance in your way some thirty years ago, you would have turned into a shape to outlast all R. B.’s poems put together. There is no use in my finding and sending it now, because it doesn’t do (with Paltry Poets) to try and drag them to the water. The two longest and worst tales (I think) in Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall, were suggested to him by Sir S. Romilly, and “a lady in Wiltshire.” I wish Murray would let me make a volume of “Selections from Crabbe”—which I know I could, so that common readers would wish to read the whole original; which now scarce any one does; nor can one wonder they do not. But Crabbe will flourish when R. B. is dead and buried. Lots of lines which he cut out of his MS. would be the beginning of a little fortune to others. I happened on this couplet the other day:

The shapeless purpose of a soul that feels,
And half suppresses wrath and half reveals.

Not that Crabbe is to live by single couplets or epigrams, but by something far better, as you know better than I. There is a long passage in the Tales of the Hall (Old Bachelor) which always reminds me of you, A. T., where the Old Bachelor recounts how he pleaded with his Whig father to be allowed to marry the Tory Squire’s daughter; when,

Coolly my father looked, and much enjoy’d
The broken eloquence his eye destroy’d, etc.

and then pleads to the Tory mother of the girl.

Methinks I have the tigress in my eye, etc.

Do look at this, A. T., when you get the Book, and don’t let my praise set you against it.

I have written you a very long letter, you see, with one very bad eye too. I thought it had mended, by help of cold water and goggles; but these last three days it has turned rusty again. I believe it misses the sea air.

δεινῶν τ᾽ ἄημα πνευμάτων ἐκοίμισε[21]
στένοντα πόντον

Do you quite understand this ἐκοίμισε? But what lines, understood or not! The two last words go alongside of my little ship with me many a time. Well, Alfred, neither you, nor the Mistress, are to answer this letter, which I still hope may please you, as it is (all the main part) written very loyally, and is all true. Now, good-bye, and remember me as your old

E. F. G.

Ne cherchez point, Iris, à percer les ténèbres[22]
Dont les Dieux sagement ont voilé l’Avenir;
Et ne consultez point tant de Devins célèbres
Pour chercher le moment qui doit nous désunir.
Livrez-vous au plaisir; tout le reste est frivole;
Et songez que, trop court pour de plus longs projets,
Tandis que nous parlons le Temps jaloux s’envole,
Et que ce Temps, hélas! est perdu pour jamais.

But wait—before I finish I must ask why you assure Clark of Trinity that it is the rooks who call “Maud, Maud, etc.” Indeed it is the Thrush, as I have heard a hundred times in a summer’s evening, when scared in the evergreens of a garden. Therefore:

Rooks in a classroom quarrel up in the tall trees caw’d;
But ’twas the thrush in the laurel, that kept crying, Maud, Maud, Maud.

Keats he put very high indeed. “I have been again reading Lord Houghton’s Life of Keats” he wrote, “whose hastiest doggrel should show Browning, Morris & Co., that they are not what the newspapers tell them they are.” “What a fuss the cockneys make about Shelley just now, surely not worth Keats’ little finger,” he wrote on another occasion. And again, “Is Mr. Rossetti a Great Poet like Browning and Morris? So the Athenæum tells me. Dear me, how thick Great Poets do grow nowadays.” And yet again, “I can’t read G. Eliot as I presume you can; I really conclude that the fault lies in me, not in her; so with Goethe (except in his letters, Table-Talk,[23] etc.), whom I try in vain to admire.”

His real love was for Crabbe, the poet, not of “realism” but of reality.

Life’s sternest painter and its best—

the poet of disillusionment. This love, which has been felt in different generations by Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Bishop Gore, he could get few of his friends to share with him. Tennyson himself was one of the few. “I keep reading Crabbe from time to time,” he writes to Tennyson; “nobody else does unless it be another ‘paltry Poet’ whom I know. The edition only sells at a shilling a volume—second-hand. I don’t wonder at young people and women (I mean no disparagement at all) not relishing even the good parts: and certainly there is plenty of bad for all readers.”

What he loved before all was “touches of nature,” the humour, the pathos, of ordinary life. He liked home-thrusts at human foibles and frailty, and again the outwelling of native nobility, generosity, or love. Newman’s early Sermons, “Plain and Parochial” as they were, perhaps for this very reason he much affected. “The best that were ever written in my judgment,” he said. He remained an admirer of Newman, and speaks enthusiastically of the Apologia and its “sincerity.” But he did not like the ritualism of the Oxford movement. His traditions were Evangelical,—one reason perhaps why he liked Newman. John Wesley was “one of his heroes,” and he had much sympathy with, and was at one period personally drawn by, evangelical and revivalist Mission preaching.

He would have sympathized with Keble’s lines teaching that his fellow-creatures should not

Strive to wind themselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.

This was probably one of the reasons why he did not like “In Memoriam.” He said indeed that he thought it too artistic, too machine-made. He said that he thought Tennyson became gradually altogether too artistic and lost in spontaneity, vigour, and freshness. Yet he himself was a most laborious artist, both in his verse and in his prose. Omar is most carefully elaborated, with correction on correction, and so are the best parts of Euphranor. His reasons were really deeper, and went more against the matter than the form. He did not like the early “Idylls of the King.” “The Holy Grail” he liked as he had liked the “Vision of Sin.” But what moved him to tears was the old-style “Northern Farmer,” the “substantial, rough-spun Nature he knew,” and “the old brute, invested by the poet with the solemn humour of Humanity like Shakespeare’s Shallow.” Yet even here a “crotchet” cropped up, as appears from the following note:

Woodbridge, May 20th, 1877.

The enclosed scrap from Notes and Queries reminded me (as probably the writer has been reminded) of your Old Farmer, the only part of which that goes against me is the “canter and canter away” of the last line. I can scarce tell you (as usual with me) why I don’t like Doctor Fell; but you know I must be right.

By the by, my old Crabbe in the Parish Register (Burials), says

Bless me! I die—and not a warning giv’n—
With much to do on earth, and all for Heaven:
No preparation for my soul’s affairs,
No leave petitioned for the Barn’s repairs, etc.

not very good; and (N.B.) I don’t mean it suggested anything in Shakespeare’s Northern Farmer—for that may pair off with Shallow.

Again, when it appeared in 1865, he was greatly taken with the “Captain.” It was a return to the old personal mood and simple direct depiction of character:

Markethill, Woodbridge,
October 22nd, 1865.

Dear Mrs. Tennyson—Talking of ships again, I liked much The Captain in the People’s Alfred. Was the last stanza (which I like also) an afterthought?—I think a really sublime thing is the end of Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!”—(which I never could read through)—The Chase of the Ships: the Hero’s being struck blind at the moment of revenge: then his being taken to see his rival and crew at the bottom of the sea. Kingsley is a distressing writer to me: but I must think this (the inspiration of it) of a piece with Homer and the Gods—which you won’t at all.

He liked, too, “Gareth and Lynette,” which again he thought more natural and direct than some of the earlier Idylls. He liked, as might have been expected, the “Ballads and other Poems.” But what is most significant, perhaps, among his likes and dislikes, is his love for “Audley Court,” “one of my old favourites,” he calls it. Why did FitzGerald like “Audley Court”? It is not one of the poems which are generally best known and most admired. Indeed, while it is in many ways beautiful and contains some splendid things, such as the sonorous line

The pillar’d dusk of sounding sycamores,

it is just one of those poems which the severe critic of Tennyson picks out for fault-finding and even for ridicule. It has what such critics call the over-elaborate, the “drawing-room” manner. Like Milton’s picture of Eve’s déjeuner, though with more humour and appropriateness, it employs the grand and sumptuous style to describe trifles, such as the venison pasty:

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied.

But on a closer consideration it will be seen that it has just what “Old Fitz” himself loved—the easy realism, the contentment with the things of this world; above all, that flavour of

After-dinner talk
Across the walnuts and the wine

which he also found and loved in that other favourite, “The Miller’s Daughter,” the harmless gossip about old friends

who was dead,
Who married, who was like to be, and how
The races went, and who would rent the hall.

This suited “Old Fitz’s” temper absolutely. The humorous pococurantism, for cynicism it hardly is, of the quatrains put into the mouth of the Poet’s friend, each ending “but let me live my life,” breathes the very spirit of his own indolent, kindly Epicureanism, and indeed the poem might almost be taken as a record of a dialogue between the two friends in their early days.

He loved, too, the “Lord of Burleigh,” “The Vision of Sin,” and “The Lady of Shalott.” The delicious idealism of these youthful pieces did not displease him. They had for him a “champagne flavour.” They were part of his own youth. For a brief hour of that fast-fleeting day, the wine of life had sparkled in his own glass, but then too soon turned flat and flavourless.

For two or three things every lover of Tennyson must thank FitzGerald. He it was who, about 1838, soon after their friendship began, got his friend, Samuel Laurence, to paint the earliest portrait of the Poet, “the only one of the old days and still the best of all to my thinking,” as he wrote in 1871. He, too, preserved and gave to Tennyson the drawing by Thackeray of the “Lord of Burleigh.” When the Poet was rather dilatory in calling at Spedding’s house to claim this portrait, FitzGerald wrote: “Tell him I don’t think Browning would have served me so, and I mean to prefer his poems for the future.” He also rescued from the flames some of the pages of the famous “Butcher’s Book,” the tall, ledger-like MS. volume, in which many of the early poems he so much loved were written, and gave them to the Library of Trinity College. About this he wrote:

Markethill, Woodbridge,
December 4th, 1864.

Dear Alfred—Now I should be almost ready to be “yours ever, etc.” if I didn’t remember to ask you if you have any objection to my giving two or three of the leaves of your old “Butcher’s Book” (do you remember?) to the Library at Trinity College? An admirer of your’s there told me they would be glad of some such thing—It was in 1842, when you were printing the two good old volumes:—in Spedding’s rooms—and the “Butcher’s Book,” after its margins serving for pipe-lights, went leaf by leaf into the fire: and I told you I would keep two or three leaves of it as a remembrance. So I took a bit of my old favourite “Audley Court”: and a bit of another, I forget which: for I can’t lay my hands on them just now. But when I do, I shall give them to Trinity College unless you are strongly opposed. I dare say, however, you would give them the whole MS. of one of your later poems: which probably they would value more.

Tennyson appreciated “Old Fitz’s” fine qualities as a critic, but he recognized their limitations, and in particular his “crotchets” and prejudices. He was himself, as is now generally recognized, a consummate critic, and withal a most kindly and catholic one. In my first conversation with him he said that he used to think Goethe a good critic. “He always discovered all the good he could in a man.” To his own contemporaries, especially towards Browning, for example, his attitude was very different, as FitzGerald acknowledged, from FitzGerald’s own. I did not like, I remember, to ask him what he thought of Browning, but his son encouraged me to do so. “You ask him,” he said. “He’ll tell you at once.” At last I did so. “A true genius, but wanting in art,” he said. And on another occasion he spoke rather more in detail to the same purpose.

A special friend of both Tennyson and FitzGerald was Thackeray. With him FitzGerald had been intimate even earlier than with Tennyson. They were friends at college, and had gone as young men together to Paris, Thackeray ostensibly to study art. FitzGerald knew Paris of old. His father had a home there when he was a child, and went there for a few months every year for some years.

When he was nearing seventy FitzGerald wrote the following delightful account of some of his recollections to Thackeray’s daughter:

Woodbridge, May 18th, 1875.

Dear Annie Thackeray—I suppose you love Paris as your Father did—as I used to do till it was made so other than it was, in the days of Louis XVIII. when I first lived in it. Then it was all irregular and picturesque; with shops, hotels, cafés, theatres, etc. intermixed all along the Boulevards, all of different sorts and sizes.

Think of my remembering the then Royal Family going in several carriages to hunt in the Forest of St. Germain’s—Louis XVIII. first, with his Gardes du Corps, in blue and silver: then Monsieur (afterwards Charles X.) with his Guard in green and gold—French horns blowing—“tra, tra, tra” (as Madame de Sévigné says), through the lines of chestnut and limes—in flower. And then Madame (of Angoulême) standing up in her carriage, blear-eyed, dressed in white with her waist at her neck—standing up in the carriage at a corner of the wood to curtsey to the English assembled there—my mother among them. This was in 1817. Now you would have made a delightful description of all this; you will say I have done so, but that is not so. And yet I saw, and see, it all.

Whenever you write again—(I don’t wish you to write now) tell me what you think of Irving and Salvini; of the former of whom I have very different reports, Macready’s Memoirs seem to me very conscientious and rather dull; toujours Megready (as one W. M. T. irreverently called him). He seems to me to have had no humour—which I also observed in his acting. He would have made a better scholar or divine, I think: a very honourable, good man anywhere and anyhow.

With Thackeray himself he always maintained the same cordial relations as he did with Tennyson. But his literary attitude shifted and varied in the same way. Here, again, he preferred the early work which he had seen in process of creation. In later years, when they met him at Woodbridge, he said to “Alfred” and his son, “I hardly dare take down Thackeray’s early books, because they are so great. It’s like waking the Thunder.” He wrote of Thackeray in 1849: “He is just the same. All the world ‘admires Vanity Fair,’ and the author is courted by Dukes and Duchesses and wits of both sexes. I like Pendennis much, and Alfred said he thought it was quite delicious: it seemed to him so mature he said.” But a little later he took alarm at the Dukes and Duchesses, and wrote to Frederick Tennyson: “I am come to London, but I do not go to Operas or Plays, and have scarce time (and it must be said, scarce inclination) to hunt up many friends—I get shyer and shyer even of those I knew. Thackeray is in such a great world that I am afraid of him; he gets tired of me and we are content to regard each other at a distance. You, Alfred, Spedding, and Allen, are the only men I ever care to see again.... As you know, I admire your poems, the only poems by a living writer I do admire, except Alfred’s.”

He told Hallam Tennyson that he greatly admired the charming scene in “Philip” where the young lady unexpectedly discovered her lover (Philip) on the box of the diligence, and quieted the screaming children inside by saying, “Hush! he’s there.”

In particular, he was very severe on anything he called “cockney,” speaking, that is, the language of the town, not of the country; in other words, dealing with nature and human nature at second-hand. To this his letters again and again return. Of “fine writing,” as he called it, even when it occurred in his own early work, he was unsparingly critical. Thus of Euphranor he wrote to Mrs. Kemble: “The Dialogue is a pretty thing in some respects but disfigured by some confounded smart writing in parts.” He thought this fault in particular, so he says in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, “the loose screw in American literature,” and deplored its presence in Lowell, a writer whom otherwise he liked. “I honestly admire his work in the main,” he says, “and I think he is altogether the best critic we have, something of what Ste. Beuve is in French.” He thought that Tennyson came to suffer from these defects in his later days, and that the artist overpowered the man.

The latest of Tennyson’s poems, of course, he did not live to see. He did not see, for instance, “Crossing the Bar.” What would he have thought of it? Another old friend of Tennyson, also a fastidious critic, the Duke of Argyll, in an unpublished letter of February 1, 1892, writing of this and of the lines on the “Death of the Duke of Clarence,” says: “Magnificent, is all I can say of your lines in the Nineteenth. The two last things of yours that I have seen, this and the ‘Bar,’ are both perfect in their several ways, and such as no other man could have written. The ‘Bar’ is the type of what I define Poetry to be, great thought in true imagery and unusual expression. All the three are needed for the type thing. Much fine poetry is to me only eloquence, which is quite another thing.” With the last sentence FitzGerald would certainly have agreed, for it is what in other words he was himself constantly saying. But he seemed to require something more than great thoughts and true images and choice diction. Poignant and revealing touches, what he called in Crabbe “shrewd hits”; feeling, as well as, if not more than, thought—this was what he asked for. All Browning’s genius seemed to him emphase, cleverness, curiosity, “cockneyism.”

“The Dramatic Idylls,” he writes to Frederick Tennyson, “seemed to me ‘Ingoldsby.’ It seems to me as if the Beautiful being already appropriated by former men of genius, those who are not inspired, can only try for a Place among them by recourse to the Quaint, Grotesque, and Ugly in all the Arts,—what I call the Gargoyle style.” And again: “I always said he must be a cockney, and now I find he is Camberwell-born—

It once was the Pastoral cockney,
It now is the cockney Profound.”

The establishment of the Browning Society tried him specially. “Imagine a man abetting all this,” he writes. Tennyson had, through life, a high opinion of FitzGerald’s powers of criticism. They had often in their youth discussed the classics of all time and all times together, and also, with the poetic freedom of young men, their seniors, Shelley, and Byron, and Wordsworth. It was FitzGerald who invented for the last the name by which he went in their circle, of the “Daddy.” They had fought for the ownership of the Wordsworthian line, the “weakest blank verse in the language”:

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.

It really was FitzGerald’s description, given in conversation, of the gentleman who was going to marry his sister. When he died in 1862 FitzGerald, writing to Tennyson, reminded him of the line.

“This letter,” he writes, “ought to be on a black-edged paper in a black-edged cover: for I have just lost a brother-in-law—one of the best of Men. If you ask, ‘Who?’ I reply, in what you once called the weakest line ever enunciated:

A Mister Wilkinson, a Clergyman.

You can’t remember this: in Old Charlotte Street, ages ago!”

In the valedictory verses Tennyson makes allusion to this critical habit:

And when I fancied that my friend
For this brief idyll would require
A less diffuse and opulent end,
And would defend his judgment well,
If I should deem it over nice,——

He himself was more catholic and generous. It was his generosity as well as their admiration for him which gave him the place he held among his brother poets and especially after he himself had won recognition among the younger men.

His relation to Browning, Patmore, and P. J. Bailey, to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, to Watson and Kipling as to Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, are well known. There is one writer who ought to be added to the list, who received some of his earliest encouragement from Tennyson—George Meredith. A letter, hitherto unpublished, written in January 1851, may illustrate this. He had just, in some trepidation, sent Tennyson his first volume of poems, containing the now well-known “Love in the Valley.” As Meredith told me himself, Tennyson replied with an exceedingly kind and “pretty” letter, saying that there was one poem in the book he could have wished he had written, and inviting Meredith to come to see him. The following is Meredith’s answer:

Sir—When I tell you that it would have been my chief ambition in publishing the little volume of poems you have received, to obtain your praise, you may imagine what pride and pleasure your letter gave me; though, indeed, I do not deserve so much as your generous appreciation would bestow, and of this I am very conscious. I had but counted twenty-three years when the book was published, which may account for, and excuse perhaps many of the immaturities. When you say you would like to know me, I can scarcely trust myself to express with how much delight I would wait upon you—a privilege I have long desired. As I suppose the number of poetic visits you receive are fully as troublesome as the books, I will not venture to call on you until you are able to make an appointment. My residence and address is Weybridge, but I shall not return to Town from Southend before Friday week. If in the meantime you will fix any day following that date, I shall gladly avail myself of the honour of your invitation. My address here is care of Mrs. Peacock, Southend, Essex. I have the honour to be, most faithfully yours,

George Meredith.

Alfred Tennyson, Esq.

The complement to “Old Fitz” was Carlyle. He was the friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. Gruff, grumbling, self-centred, satirical, at times even rude and rough, as he was, both of them seemed to have got not so much on his blind, as on his kind side from the first, and always to have remained there. Carlyle’s descriptions of Tennyson as a young man in the early “forties” and of the pleasure he had in his company are well known. “He seemed to take a fancy to me,” Tennyson said himself one day while we talked about him at Farringford. They foregathered a good deal at this period, sat and smoked silently, walked and talked together, both by day and night. FitzGerald told Hallam Tennyson, years after, during the visit to Woodbridge, that Carlyle was much concerned at this period about his father’s poverty, and said to him, “Alfred must have a pension.” The story of the way in which he spurred on “Dicky” Milnes to secure the pension is now classical. What his special effect, if he had any, on Tennyson was, it might be difficult to estimate or analyse.

The younger generation to-day does not remember the period of Carlyle’s immense influence. It lasted just into the youth of my contemporaries and myself, or perhaps a little longer, and then began to wane and die away. He certainly was a “radio-active” force in the days and with the men of Tennyson’s youth,—Maurice, and Sterling, and “Dicky” Milnes, as he was a little later with Ruskin and Kingsley. FitzGerald, with his detachment and his fearless sincerity, estimated him as fairly as any one. “Do you see Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets?” he wrote. “They make the world laugh, and his friends rather sorry for him. But that is because people will still look for practical measures from him. One must be content with him as a great satirist who can make us feel when we are wrong, though he cannot set us right. There is a bottom of truth in Carlyle’s wildest rhapsodies.”

He wrote to Frederick Tennyson in 1850: “When I spoke of the ‘Latter-Day Prophet’ I conclude you have read or heard of Carlyle’s Pamphlets. People are tired of them and of him; he only foams, snaps, and howls and no progress people say. This is about true, and yet there is vital good in all he has written.” Again, in 1854, he says, “Carlyle I did not go to see, for I have really nothing to tell him, and I am tired of hearing him growl, tho’ I admire him as much as ever.” “I wonder if he ever thinks how much sound and fury he has vented,” he writes on another occasion.

But the posthumous publication of Carlyle’s Letters, as he wrote about a fortnight before his own death, “raised him in FitzGerald’s esteem”; and his last effort was to go to Chelsea to see his statue, and the old house hard by which he had not seen for five-and-twenty years, to find it, alas, “deserted, neglected, and ‘To let!’”

Carlyle was indeed much what “Old Fitz” describes. He was a powerful solvent of his age. He destroyed many shams, “Hebrew rags,” “old clothes,” as he called them. Both by his own example and his fiery energy he inculcated the “Gospel of Work.” He was not a modern realist, but a man who dealt in realities, who perceived that virtue and beauty and faith are as real as vice and ugliness and unfaith, nay, perhaps more real; but that certainly neither are shams, neither God nor the Devil, though of shams, of false gods and false devils, there are many. His appreciation of poetry was, as is well known, but scant and intermittent. He used to banter Tennyson and call him “a Life-Guardsman spoiled by making poetry,” but he became converted even to his poems, though, as he said, this was surprising to himself. He “felt the pulse of a real man’s heart” in the 1842 volumes. “Ulysses” was a special favourite. He quoted again and again the lines:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.

“These lines do not make me weep,” he said, “but there is in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read.” He, fortunately, also “took a fancy” to Mrs. Tennyson when he met her as a bride at Tent Lodge, Coniston, partly because, in answer to one of his wild grumbles, she said, “That is not sane, Mr. Carlyle.” An unpublished letter from Carlyle of the date October 1850, describes an admirer of Tennyson’s poems, an ill-starred but brave man, a skilful physician, a friend of Dr. John Carlyle at Leamington, who, after losing the greater part of his face by caries of the bone, had at last been cured, though awfully disfigured. “He fled to Keswick,” writes Carlyle, “and there he now resides, not idle still, nor forsaken of friends, or hope, or domestic joy—a monument of human courtesy, and really a worthy and rather interesting man. Such is your admirer and mine. Heaven be good to him and us.”

FitzGerald, in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, quotes with approval a criticism of Lowell’s that Carlyle “was a poet in all but rhythm”; and it would not be difficult to find “parallel passages” between Tennyson and Carlyle, between Sartor Resartus and “In Memoriam.” The Life of Sterling, too, should be read by any student anxious to “reconstitute the atmosphere” in which that poem grew up, and which, to a certain extent, it still breathes. But “parallel passages” are misleading. Suffice it to say that both went through the storm and stress of a doubting age, both took their stand on the solid rock of God and of real, healthy human nature,—both emerged in the “Eternal Yea.”

Froude, in his history of Carlyle’s Life in London, has a most interesting autobiographic passage about Carlyle’s position and influence in 1843, the time of the publication of Past and Present, which brings this out with special force. He says:

In this condition the best and bravest of my own contemporaries determined to have done with insincerity, to find ground under their feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and what we could honestly regard as true and believe that and live by it. Tennyson became the voice of this feeling in poetry, Carlyle in what was called prose, though prose it was not, but something by itself with a form and melody of its own.

Tennyson’s Poems, the group of Poems which closed with “In Memoriam,” became to many of us what the “Christian Year” was to orthodox Churchmen. We read them, and they became part of our minds, the expression in exquisite language of the feelings which were working in ourselves. Carlyle stood beside him as a prophet and teacher; and to the young, the generous, to every one who took life seriously, who wished to make an honourable use of it and could not be content with sitting down and making money, his words were like the morning reveille.

Others may come at last to the sad conclusion that nothing can be known about the world, that the external powers, whatever they may be, are indifferent to human action or human welfare. To such an opinion some men, and those not the worst, may be driven after weary observation of life. But the young will never believe it; or if they do they have been young only in name.

If the first paragraphs aptly “place” Tennyson and Carlyle, the last, though not intentionally, exactly suits their friend, the translator of the Rubáiyát. FitzGerald remained, as his friend the Master of Trinity College (W. H. Thompson) said, in “Doubting Castle.” Tennyson was the most hopeful, as well as the most balanced and sane, and therefore the most helpful of the three.

Toward the end of his life, Carlyle, in the Inaugural Address given by him as Rector of Edinburgh University, in which he summed up so many of the convictions of a lifetime, put forward the following description of the completely healthy human spirit. “A man all lucid and in equilibrium. His intellect a clear mirror, geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to all objects and impressions made on it, and imaging all things in their correct proportions, not twisted up into convex or concave and distorting everything so that he cannot see the truth of the matter without endless groping and manipulation—healthy, clear and free, and discerning all round about him.” He put this picture before young men as the ideal to be aimed at by the intellectual student, and in particular by the man of letters. “But,” he said, “we can never never attain that at all.” Perhaps not altogether. Perhaps even he who invented the phrase for the poet’s duty of “holding the mirror up to Nature,” did not wholly attain to it. But, according to his measure, it is no bad description of Alfred Tennyson, with the “universality of his mind,” the simplicity of his good sense, the childlike sincerity of his spirit. This quality it was that both Carlyle and FitzGerald found and liked in him.

It has been said that Tennyson and FitzGerald read the same books. One of the best instances of this is to be found in a long letter of FitzGerald’s about posthumous fame and literary immortality. It was written to Cowell in 1847, and is given by Dr. Aldis Wright in his first collection. After speaking of Homer and the Iliad, FitzGerald writes:

Yet as I often think it is not the poetical imagination, but bare Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the Iliad; the history of the world, the great infinitudes of Space and Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me. And when we think that Man must go on in the same plodding way, one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of discovery will distance all his imaginations and dissolve the language in which they are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now after two thousand years: a space that seems long to us whose lives are so brief; but a moment, the twinkling of an eye, if compared (not to Eternity alone), but to the ages which it is now known the world must have existed, and (unless for some external violence) must continue to exist.

Lyell in his book about America, says that the Falls of Niagara, if (as seems certain) they have worked their way back southwards for seven miles, must have taken over 35,000 years to do so at the rate of something over a foot a year! Sometimes they fall back on a stratum that crumbles away from behind them more easily: but then again they have to roll over rock that yields to them scarce more perceptibly than the anvil to the serpent. And these very soft strata, which the Cataract now erodes, contain evidences of a race of animals, and of the action of seas washing over them, long before Niagara came to have a distinct current; and the rocks were compounded ages and ages before those strata! So that, as Lyell says, the geologist, looking at Niagara forgets even the roar of its waters in the contemplation of the awful processes of time that it suggests. It is not only that the vision of Time must wither the Poet’s hope of immortality, but it is in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.

This train of thought was evidently often present to FitzGerald’s mind. It oppressed him. It makes itself felt in the Rubáiyát. It was one of the many great ideas he imported into, or educed from, the old Persian Astronomer.

And fear not lest existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has poured
Millions of Bubbles like us and will pour
When you and I behind the Veil are past:
Oh but the long long while the world shall last,
Which of our coming and departure heeds
As the Sev’n Seas should heed a pebble-cast.

It was even more constantly present to the mind of Tennyson. Astronomy and Geology had been among his favourite studies from his early youth, and remained so all his life. When I was walking with him toward the Needles and looking at the magnificent chalk cliff below the downs, and spoke about his felicitous epithet for it—“the milky steep,” he said, “The most wonderful thing about that cliff is to think it was all once alive.” The allusions to it in his poems are innumerable:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

He was always “hearing the roll of the ages.” He, too, had read his Lyell, and the contemplation of geological time suggested to him exactly the same reflections which FitzGerald draws out. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that he himself may have imparted them to FitzGerald. For he has embodied just these thoughts in that noble late poem “Parnassus,” with a resemblance which is startling. But while the parallel between “Parnassus” and FitzGerald’s letter is extraordinarily close up to a certain point, the contrast, when it is reached, is even more striking, and is the fundamental contrast between the two men and their creeds:

What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain,
Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain?
On those two known peaks they stand, ever spreading and heightening;
Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning!
Look, in their deep double shadow the crown’d ones all disappearing!
Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing!
Sounding for ever and ever? pass on! the sight confuses—
These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!

So far Tennyson agrees with Omar:

Ah make the most of what we yet may spend
Before we too into the dust descend;
Dust into dust and under dust to lie,
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and sans end!

But then comes the divergence, conveyed with the exquisitely sympathetic change of rhythm:

If the lips were touch’d with fire from off a pure Pierian altar,
Tho’ their music here be mortal, need the singer greatly care?
Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter;
Let the golden Iliad vanish, Homer here is Homer there.

The beautiful lines which form the Envoy to “Tiresias,” already alluded to, never reached their address. I remember well, when we spoke of FitzGerald, the sadness with which Tennyson said to me, “He never saw them. He died before they were sent him.” After his death Tennyson added the Epilogue on the same note. It is touching to see that in his closing lines to his old friend he had hinted with tender delicacy at the same creed to which he always clung:

Gone into darkness, that full light
Of friendship! past, in sleep, away
By night, into the deeper night!
The deeper night? A clearer day
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth—
If night, what barren toil to be!
What life, so maim’d by night, were worth
Our living out? Not mine to me
Remembering all the golden hours
Now silent, and so many dead
And him the last; and laying flowers,
This wreath, above his honour’d head,
And praying that, when I from hence
Shall fade with him into the unknown,
My close of earth’s experience
May prove as peaceful as his own.

Like many rough and overbearing men Carlyle liked those who stood up to him and gave him back, in his own phrase, “shake for shake.” FitzGerald was one of these. He made his better acquaintance by contradicting and correcting him about the battlefield and the buried warriors of Naseby Fight. Carlyle took it all in excellent part, and they became close friends. Carlyle went to visit him and invited the many letters which FitzGerald wrote. In his later years he sent one of these letters to C. E. Norton as a “slight emblem and memorial of the peaceable, affectionate, ultra-modest man and his innocent far niente life”; “and,” he adds, “the connection (were there nothing more) of Omar, the Mahometan Blackguard, and Oliver Cromwell, the English Puritan.”

But “Old Fitz” could criticize and sum up Carlyle equally effectively. He most happily pointed out his inconsistency in praising the “Hebrew rags” of the old Evangelical beliefs when seen in Cromwell and his generals, and not being willing to let them still serve for humble folk in his own day. His tone here is singularly like that of Tennyson’s well-known lines, beginning:

Leave thou thy sister when she prays.

“We may be well content,” FitzGerald writes, “even to suffer some absurdities in the Form if the Spirit does well on the whole.” He would probably have agreed with much of Tennyson’s “Akbar’s Dream,” which he did not live to read. For the tenets of “Omar,” “The Mahometan Blackguard,” must not be taken as representing the whole of FitzGerald’s philosophy, any more than his eccentricities and negligent habits must be taken as a complete expression of his life.

Too exclusive attention has been paid to both. Dr. Aldis Wright, one of the few surviving friends who knew him really well, speaks justly of “the exaggerated stories of his slovenliness and his idleness,” and “of the way in which he has been made responsible for all the oddities of his family.” “Every tale,” he says, “that may be true of some of his kin, is fathered upon him.”

And FitzGerald’s own Preface to his translation of Omar shows what his real moral and religious attitude toward the Rubáiyát was. He felt bound, so far as the spirit, if not the letter, went, to present it faithfully, if not literally; but he speaks very gravely of it. “The quatrains here selected,” he writes in the Preface, “are strung into something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the ‘Drink and make merry’ which (genuine or not), recurs over frequently in the original. Either way, the result is sad enough, saddest perhaps when most ostentatiously merry, more apt to move sorrow than Anger toward the old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavouring to unshackle his steps from Destiny and to catch some authentic Glimpse of To-morrow, fell back upon To-day (which has outlived so many To-morrows!) as the only ground he got to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet.”

The truth is, Old Fitz’s foibles, and indeed his faults, were only too patent to others and to himself. But if noscitur a sociis holds good, Carlyle and Tennyson and Thackeray, Spedding, Thompson, the Cowells, and Mrs. Kemble, the friends of his whole lifetime, Lowell and C. E. Norton, those of his later years, may be permitted to outweigh his at times too tolerant cultivation and indulgence of his burly Vikings. Tennyson’s relation to him was summed up in his letter to Sir Frederick Pollock which Dr. Aldis Wright quotes, but which may fitly here be quoted again: “I had no truer friend; he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit.”

These words, with Tennyson’s poetic picture already quoted, with Carlyle’s epithets, “innocent, far niente, ultra-modest,” with his own writings taken as a whole and not Omar alone, especially his Letters, may be left to speak for him in life and in death,—these and the epitaph which he asked to have placed upon his gravestone:

“It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.”

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