“I am so delighted at the glory E. F. G. has gained by his translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The ‘Contemporary Review’ and the ‘Spectator’ newspaper! It is full time that Fitz should be disinterred, and exhibited to the world as one of the most gifted of Britons. And Bernard Quaritch deserves a piece of plate or a statue for the way he has thrust the Rubáiyát to the front.”
There is no understanding FitzGerald till one fully realises that vulgar ambition had absolutely no place in his nature. Your ass in the lion’s skin nowadays is the ass who fain would be lionised; and the modern version of the parable of the talents is too often the man who, untalented, tries to palm off Brummagem counterfeits. FitzGerald’s fear was not that he would write worse than half his compeers, but that he might write as ill. “This visionary inactivity,” he tells John Allen, “is better than the mischievous activity of so many I see about me.” He applied Malthus’s teaching to literature; he was content so long as he pleased the Tennysons, some half-dozen other friends, and himself, than whom no critic ever was more fastidious. And when one thinks of all the “great poems” that were published during his lifetime, and read and praised (more praised than read perhaps), and then forgotten, one wonders if, after all, he was so wholly wrong in that he read for profit and scribbled for amusement,—that he communed with his
own heart and was still. Besides, had he not “awful examples”? There was the Suffolk parson, his contemporary, who announced at nineteen that he had read all Shakespeare and Milton, and did not see why he should not at any rate equal them. So he fell to work—his poems were a joy to FitzGerald. Then there was Bernard Barton. FitzGerald glances at his passion for publishing, his belief that “there could not be too much poetry abroad.” And lastly there was Carlyle, half scornful of FitzGerald’s “ultra modesty and innocent far-niente life,” his own superhuman activity regarded meanwhile by FitzGerald with a gentle half-pitying wonder, of which one catches a premonitory echo in this extract from a long letter [87] of Sir Frederick Pollock’s to W. H. Thompson. It bears date 14th February 1840, two years before Carlyle and FitzGerald met:—
“Carlyle’s ‘Chartism’ has been much read. It has fine things in it, but nothing new. He is eminently a man of one idea, but then neither he nor any one else knows exactly what that one is. So that by dint of shifting it about to and fro, and, as you observe, clothing his remarks in the safe obscurity of a foreign language, he manages to produce a great impression. Truly he is a trumpet that gives an uncertain sound, an instrument of no base metal, but played without book, whose compass is not ascertained, and continually failing from straining at too high a note. Spedding has not yet found him out; FitzGerald has, and we lamentably rejoice at our melancholy discovery. Never was there such a waste of Faith as in that man. He is ever preaching Faith. Very well, but in what? Why, again says he, ‘Faith’—that is, Faith in Faith. Objectless, purposeless, unmeaning, disappearing, and eluding all grasp when any occasion for action arises, when anything is to be done, as sufficiently appears from the miserable unpracticability of the latter chapters of the ‘Chartism,’ where he comes forward to give directions for what is to be done.”
FitzGerald’s wide, albeit eclectic reading, is sufficiently illustrated on every page of his published Letters. When, fourteen years before his death, his eyesight began to fail him, he employed boy-readers, one of whom read him the whole of the Tichborne trial. One summer night in 1889 I sat and smoked with this boy, a pleasant young man, in the bar-parlour of the Bull Hotel. He told me 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! In the bar-parlour sat an oldish man, who presently
joined in our conversation. He had made the lead coffin for “the old Major” (FitzGerald’s father), and another for Mr John; and he seemed half to resent that he had not performed the same office for Mr Edward himself, for whom, however, he once built a boat. He told me, moreover, how years before Mr FitzGerald had congratulated him on some symptoms of heart disease, had said he had it himself, and was glad of it, for “when he came to die, he didn’t want to have a lot of women messing about him.”
Next day I went and called on FitzGerald’s old housekeeper, Mrs Howe, and her husband. She the “Fairy Godmother,” as FitzGerald delighted to call her, was blithe and chirpy as ever, with pleasant talk of “our gentleman”: “So kind he was, not never one to make no obstacles. Such a joky gentleman he was, too. Why, once he says to me, ‘Mrs Howe, I didn’t know we had express trains here.’ And I said, ‘Whatever do you mean, sir?’ and he says, ‘Why, look at Mrs ---’s dress there.’ And, sure enough, she had a long train to it, you know.” Her husband (“the King of Clubs”) was eighty-four, but the same cheery, simple soul he always was. Mr Spalding, one broiling day, saw him standing bare-headed, and peering intently for good five minutes into the pond at Little Grange. “What is it, Howe?” he asked him; and
the old man presently answered, “How fond them ducks dew seem of water, to be sure.” Which, for some cause or other, greatly tickled FitzGerald.
I was staying in Woodbridge at the “Bull,” kept whilom by “good John Grout,” from whom FitzGerald procured the Scotch ale which he would set to the fire till it “just had a smile on it,” and who every Christmas sent him a present of mince-pies and a jug of punch. An excellent man, and a mighty horse-dealer, better versed in horse-flesh than in literature. After a visit from Lord Tennyson, FitzGerald told Grout that Woodbridge should feel itself honoured. John had not quite understood, so presently took a chance of asking my father who that gentleman was Mr FitzGerald had been talking of. “Mr Tennyson,” said my father, “the poet-laureate.” “Dissáy,” [90] said John, warily; “anyhow he didn’t fare to know much about hosses when I showed him over my stables.”
From my bedroom window I could see FitzGerald’s old lodgings over Berry’s, where he sojourned from 1860 till 1873. The cause of his leaving them is only half told in Mr Aldis Wright’s edition of the Letters (p. 365, footnote). Mr Berry, a small man, had taken to himself a second wife, a buxom widow weighing fourteen stone;