Except in February 1867, when he was strongly opposed to Lord Rendlesham’s election, he took no active part in politics. “Don’t write politics—I agree with you beforehand,” is a postscript (1852) to Frederic Tennyson; and in a letter from Mr William Bodham Donne to my father occurs this passage: “E. F. G. informs me that he gave his landlord instructions in case any one called about his vote to say that Mr F. would not vote, advised every one to do the same, and let the rotten matter bust itself.” So it certainly stands in the letter, which bears date 29th October 1868; but, according to Mr Mowbray Donne, “the phrase was
rather: ‘Let the rotten old ship go to pieces of itself.’ At least,” he adds, “so I have always heard it; and this suggests that once there was a galleon worth preserving, but that he would not patch up the old craft. He may have said both, of course.” Anyhow, rightly or wrongly, FitzGerald was sorrowfully convinced that England’s best day was over, and that he, that any one, was powerless to arrest the inevitable doom. “I am quite assured that this Country is dying, as other Countries die, as Trees die, atop first. The lower limbs are making all haste to follow.” He wrote thus in 1861, when the local squirearchy refused to interest itself in the “manuring and skrimmaging” of the newly established rifle corps. And here are some more vaticinations of evil:—
“I have long felt about England as you do, and even made up my mind to it, so as to sit comparatively, if ignobly, easy on that score. Sometimes I envy those who are so old that the Curtain will probably fall on them before it does on their Country. If one could save the Race, what a Cause it would be! not for one’s own glory as a member of it, nor even for its glory as a Nation: but because it is the only spot in Europe where Freedom keeps her place. Had I Alfred’s voice, I would not have mumbled for years over In Memoriam and The Princess, but sung such strains as would have revived the Μαραθωνομαχους ανδρας to guard the territory they had won.”
The curtain has fallen twelve years now on FitzGerald,—it is fifty-four years since he wrote those words: God send their dark forebodings may prove false! But they clouded his life, and were partly the cause why, Ajax-like, he loitered in his tent.
His thoughts on religion he kept to himself. A letter of June 1885 from the late Master of Trinity to my father opens thus:—
“My dear Archdeacon,—I ought to have thanked you ere this for your letter, and the enclosed hymn, which we much admire, and cannot but be touched by. [76] The more perhaps as our dear dead friend seems to have felt its pathos. I have more to repent of than he had. 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. This is to me a great problem,—not to be solved by the ordinary expedients, nor on this side the Veil, I think.”
A former rector of Woodbridge, now many years dead, once called on FitzGerald to express his regret that he never saw him at church. “Sir,” said FitzGerald, “you might have conceived that a man has not come to my years of life 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.” Certain
it is that FitzGerald’s was a most reverent mind, and I know that the text on his grave was of his own choosing—“It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” I know, too, that sometimes he would sit and listen in a church porch while service was going on, and slip away unperceived before the people came out. Still, it seems to me beyond question that his version of the ‘Rubáiyát’ is an utterance of his soul’s deepest doubts, and that hereafter it will come to be recognised as the highest expression of Agnosticism:—
“With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d—
‘I came like Water, and like Wind I go.’Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.* * * * *
We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.”
Yet to how many critics this has seemed but a poem of the wine-cup and roses!