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.