So his letters are full of the books he has been reading, rather than of the people he has been talking with. But what of his own books, especially of the one that has made him famous? About that, it must be said at once, the correspondence tells comparatively little. His Persian studies were only an episode in his life, interesting enough at the time, but not a continuous passion, like, for instance, his reading of Crabbe, and his long persisted in—never relinquished—attempt to secure for that half-forgotten Suffolk poet the honor rightfully belonging to him. Concerning that pious attempt, as concerning a possible republication of some of his translations from the Spanish and the Greek, he left directions with his literary executor; but not a word about Omar Khayyám.
The whole Persian business, indeed, if one may speak of it so, appears to have been largely a matter of friendship, or at least to have been begun as such. Cowell had become absorbed in that language, and enticed his old Spanish pupil to follow him. The first mention of the subject to be found in the published letters occurs in 1853. FitzGerald has ordered Eastwick’s “Gulistan:” “for I believe I shall potter out so much Persian.” Two months afterward he writes to Frederic Tennyson: “I amuse myself 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 us to study a little together.” Friendly feeling has served the world many a good turn, but rarely a better one than this.
Three or four years later comes the first reference to Omar. “Old Omar,” he says, “rings like true metal.” Now he is translating the quatrains, though he has little to say about them. He finds it amusing to “take what liberties he likes with these Persians,” who, he thinks, are not poets enough to frighten one from so doing. On a 1st of July he writes: “June over! A thing I think of with Omar-like sorrow.” Then he is preparing to send some of the more innocent of the quatrains to “Fraser’s Magazine,” the editor of which has asked him for a contribution. He has begun to look upon Omar as rather more his property than Cowell’s. “He and I are more akin, are we not?” he writes to his teacher. “You see all his beauty, but you don’t feel with him in some respects as I do.” He is taking all pains, not for literalness, but to make the thing live. It must live; if not with Omar’s life, why, then, with the translator’s. And live it did, and does,—
“The rose of Iran on an English stock.”
The Fraser story is well known,—a classical example of the rejection of a future classic. The editor took the manuscript, but kept it in its pigeonhole (“Thou knowest not which shall prosper” being as true a text for editors as for other men—“Sir,” said Doctor Johnson, “a fallible being will fail somewhere”), and at last FitzGerald asked it back, added something to it, and printed it anonymously. This was in 1859. He gave one copy to Cowell (who “was naturally alarmed at it; he being a very religious man”), one copy to George Borrow, and one—a good while afterward—to “old Donne.” Some copies he kept for himself. The remainder, two hundred, more or less, he presented to Mr. Quaritch, who had printed them for him, and who worked them off upon his customers, as best he could, mostly at two cents apiece.
In the course of the next few years three other editions were printed—all anonymously—for the sake of alterations and additions (a man of taste is sure to be a patient reviser), but there is next to nothing about them in the letters. No one cares for such things, the translator says. He hardly knows why he prints them, only that he likes to make an end of the matter. So he writes to Cowell. As for the rest of his correspondents, they are more likely to be interested in other things,—his garden, his boat, his reading. By 1863 he is pretty well tired of everything Persian. “Oh dear,” he says to his teacher, “when I look at Homer, Dante and Virgil, Æschylus, Shakespeare, etc., those Orientals look—silly! Don’t resent my saying so. Don’t they?” An English masterpiece had been made, but neither the maker of it nor any one else had yet suspected the fact.
The merits of the work seem to have been first publicly recognized in 1869 by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, in an article contributed to the “North American Review.” “The work of a poet inspired by the work of a poet,” he pronounces it; “not a copy, but a reproduction, not a translation, but the redelivery of a poetic inspiration.” “There is probably nothing in the mass of English translations or reproductions of the poetry of the East to be compared with this little volume in point of value as English poetry. In the strength of rhythmical structure, in force of expression, in musical modulation, and in mastery of language, the external character of the verse corresponds with the still rarer qualities of imagination and of spiritual discernment which it displays.”
It would be pleasant to know how appreciation of this kind, coming unexpectedly from a stranger over seas, affected the still anonymous, obscurity-loving translator; but if he ever read it, or, having read it, said anything about it, the letters make no sign. He and his work were still comfortably obscure. His old friend Carlyle heard not a word about the matter till 1873, when Professor Norton, who meanwhile had somehow discovered the name of the man he had been praising, mentioned the poem to him, and insisted upon giving him a copy. Carlyle, much pleased, at once wrote to FitzGerald a letter which was undoubtedly meant to be very kind and handsome, but which, read in the light of the present, sounds a little perfunctory, and even a bit patronizing. The translation, he says, is a “meritorious and successful performance.” We can almost fancy that we are listening to a good-natured but truthful man who feels it his duty to speak well of a pretty good composition written by a fairly bright grammar school boy.
It was all one to FitzGerald. Perhaps he thought the compliment as good as he deserved. He was getting old—as he had been doing for the last twenty-five years. Persian poetry was little or nothing to him now—“a ten years’ dream.” The fruit had dropped from the tree; let the earth care for it. So he returns to his Crabbe, to Sainte-Beuve, to Madame de Sévigné, to Don Quixote, to Wesley’s Journal, and the rest. Such little time as he has to live, he will live quietly. And ten years afterward, when he died,—suddenly, as he had always hoped,—some one put on his gravestone that most Omaric of Scripture texts, “It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” Perhaps the words were of his own choosing. Certainly no others could have suited him so well. If he had been eccentric, idle, unambitious, ease-loving, incapable, a pitcher “leaning all awry,” he had been what the Potter made him.
“The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,