Bookishness of this affectionate, enthusiastic sort, constantly recurring, would be enough of itself to give the letters a welcome; for every reader loves to hear books praised at first hand, the man rather than the critic speaking, even though they be such as lie outside the too narrow limits of his own appreciation. Happiness is contagious, and it is better than nothing, as was said just now, to warm one’s self at another’s fire.
FitzGerald’s relations with books (with his books) were those of a lover. He can never say all he feels about Virgil. Horace he is unable to care about, in spite of his good sense, elegance, and occasional force. “He never made my eyes wet as Virgil does.” When he reads “Comus” and “Lycidas,” even at seventy, it is “with wonder and a sort of awe.” Surely he was a man of taste; born to be an appreciator of other men’s good work.
And because he was a man of taste,—or partly for that reason,—his praise, even in its warmest and most personal expression (like the words just quoted about Virgil), has not only no taint of affectation, but no suggestion of sentimentality. With him, as with all healthy souls, feeling was a matter of moments; it came in jets, not in a stream; and its outgiving was always with a note of unconsciousness, of deep and absolute sincerity. His life, inward and outward, was pitched in a low key. He never complained, let what would happen; he had too much of “old Omar’s consolation” for that (too much fatalism, that is); his own weaknesses, even, he took as they were; why regret what was past mending? but his prevailing mood was anything but rhapsodical. All the more effective, therefore, are the outbursts—frequent, but never more than a sentence or two together—in which he utters himself touching those best of all companions, his “friends on the shelf.”
The most striking instance of this affectionate absorption, this falling in love with a book, as one cannot help calling it, occurred in the last decade of his life. In the summer of 1875, when his health seemed to be failing, and he was beginning, as he said, to “smell the ground,” he suddenly became enamored of Madame de Sévigné. Till then, in spite of his favorite Sainte-Beuve, he had kept aloof from her, repelled by her perpetual harping on her daughter. Now he finds that “it is all genuine, and the same intense feeling expressed in a hundred natural yet graceful ways; and beside all this such good sense, good feeling, humor, love of books and country life, as makes her certainly the queen of all letter-writers.”
The next spring he wishes he had the “Go” in him; he would visit his dear Sévigné’s Rochers, as he would Abbotsford and Stratford. The “fine creature,” much more alive to him than most friends, has been his companion at the seashore. She now occupies Montaigne’s place, and worthily; “she herself a lover of Montaigne, and with a spice of his free thought and speech in her.” He sometimes laments not having known her before; but reflects that “perhaps such an acquaintance comes in best to cheer one toward the end.” Henceforward, year after year, in spring especially, he talks of the dear lady’s charms. “My blessed Sévigné,” “my dear old Sévigné,” he calls her; “welcome as the flowers of May.” Like the best of Scott’s characters, she is real and present to him. “When my oracle last night was reading to me of Dandie Dinmont’s blessed visit to Bertram in Portanferry gaol, I said—‘I know it’s Dandie, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised to see him come into this room.’ No—no more than—Madame de Sévigné! I suppose it is scarce right to live so among shadows; but after near seventy years so passed, que voulez-vous?” One thinks of what Emerson said, that there is creative reading as well as creative writing.
As is true of all readers, every kind of human capacity being limited, FitzGerald found many likely books lying mysteriously outside the range of his sympathies. He loved Longfellow (and so “could not call him Mister”) and admired Emerson (with qualifications—“I don’t like the ‘Humble Bee,’ and won’t like the ‘Humble Bee’”); and he delighted in Lowell (the critical essays), and “rather loved” Holmes; but he “could never take to that man of true genius, Hawthorne.” “I will have another shot,” he said. But it was useless. He confesses his failure to Professor Norton. “I feel sure the fault must be mine, as I feel about Goethe, who is yet a sealed book to me.” He expects to “die ungoethed, so far as poetry goes.” He supposes there is a screw loose in him on this point. Again he writes: “I have failed in another attempt at ‘Gil Blas.’ I believe I see its easy grace, humor, etc. But it is (like La Fontaine) too thin a wine for me: all sparkling with little adventures, but no one to care about; no color, no breadth, like my dear Don, whom I shall return to forthwith.” Happy reader, who could give so pretty a reason for the want of faith that was in him. If he lacked patience to write formal criticism, he had the neatest kind of knack at critical obiter dicta.
Books were his best friends; or, if that be too much to say, they were the ones that he liked best to have about him. As for human intimates,—well, it is hard to know how to express it, but he seemed, especially as he grew older, not to crave very much of their society. He loved to write to them,—not too often, lest they should be troubled about replying,—but he would never visit them; and what is stranger, he cared little, nay, he almost dreaded, to have them visit him. His house he devoted to his nieces, for such part of the year as they chose to occupy it, reserving but one room to himself. This serves for “parlor, bedroom and all,” he tells Mrs. Kemble; “which I really prefer, as it reminds me of the cabin of my dear little ship—mine no more.” Still the house is large enough. If any of his friends, Tennyson, Spedding, Carlyle, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Norton, or who not, should happen to be in the neighborhood, he would be delighted, truly delighted, to see them; but none of them must ever undertake the journey on purpose. He couldn’t render it worth their while, and it would really make him unhappy. He was never in danger of forgetting them, and he had no fear of their forgetting him. If they suffered, he suffered with them. If one of them died, he wrote of him in the tenderest and most poignant strain.
In January, 1864, all his letters are full of Thackeray, whose death had occurred on the day before Christmas. He sits “moping about him,” reading his books and the few of his letters that he has preserved. He writes to Laurence: “I am surprised almost to find how much I am thinking of him: so little as I had seen him for the last ten years; not once for the last five. I had been told—by you, for one—that he was spoiled. I am glad therefore that I have scarce seen him since he was ‘old Thackeray.’ I keep reading his ‘Newcomes’ of nights, and as it were hear him saying so much of it; and it seems to me as if he might be coming up my stairs, and about to come (singing) into my room, as in old Charlotte Street thirty years ago.”[6]
Hear him again as he writes of Spedding, the wisest man he has ever known, “a Socrates in life and in death,” who has been run over by a cab in London, and is dying at the hospital: “My dear old Spedding, though I have not seen him these twenty years and more, and probably should never see him again; but he lives, his old self, in my heart of hearts; and all I hear of him does but embellish the recollection of him, if it could be embellished; for he is but the same that he was from a boy, all that is best in heart and head, a man that would be incredible had one not known him.” And when all is over, and Laurence sends him tidings of the event, this is his answer: “It was very, very good of you to think of writing to me at all on this occasion: much more, writing to me so fully, almost more fully than I dared at first to read: though all so delicately and as you always write. It is over! I shall not write about it. He was all you say.” How perfect! And how it goes to the quick!
Not for want of heart, surely, did such a man choose the companionship of books rather than of his fellows. He was born to be a solitary, or believed that he was; at all events, it was too late now for him to be anything else. Whether nature or he had made his bed, it was made, and henceforth he must lie in it. “Twenty years’ solitude,” he says to Mrs. Kemble, “makes me very shy.” And he writes to Sir Frederick Pollock, who has proposed to visit him, that he feels nervous at the prospect of meeting old friends, “after all these years.” He fears they will not find him in person what he is by letter. Every recluse knows that trouble. With books it was another story. In their presence he felt no misgivings, no palsying diffidence. They would never expect of him what he could not render, nor find him altered from his old self. If he happened to be awkward or dull, as he often was, they would never know it. And really, with them on his shelves, and with his habit of living by himself, he did not need intellectual society,—just a few commonplace, kindly, more or less sensible bodies to speak with in a neighborly way about the weather, the crops, or the day’s events, and to play cards with of an evening. He was one of the fortunates—or unfortunates—who have a “talent for dullness.” The word is his own. “I really do like to sit in this doleful place with a good fire, a cat and dog on the rug, and an old woman in the kitchen.” He reveled in the pleasures of memory. He loved his friends as they were years ago,—“old Thackeray,” “old Jem,” “old Alfred,”—and only hoped they would love him in the same manner.