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 imperfect 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.
And as he was always reading Scott, and as often praising him, so he was always reading and praising Don Quixote. In 1867 he has been on his yacht. “I have had Don Quixote, Boccaccio, and my dear Sophocles (once more) for company on board: the first of these so delightful that I got to love the very dictionary in which I had to look out the words: yes, and often the same words over and over again. The book really seemed to me the most delightful of all books: Boccaccio delightful too, but millions of miles behind; in fact, a whole planet away.” In 1876 his mind is the same. “I have taken refuge from the Eastern Question in Boccaccio.... I suppose one must read this in Italian as my dear Don in Spanish: the language of each fitting the subject ‘like a glove.’ But there is nothing to come up to the Don and his Man.”