The following letter to Tennyson, written in 1870, is necessary to the full understanding of Tennyson’s reply (see Memoir by his Son)[107]:
My dear Alfred—I do not know where you are, and I want to know for three reasons: 1st, that I may thank you for your book; 2nd, that I may send you mine; 3rd, that I may let you know, if you do not know it already, that there has been a box here these many weeks, which is meant for you and comes from FitzGerald.
A copy of your new volume[108] came early from the publisher, yet not so early but that it found me already half way through. I was happy to observe that neither years nor domestic happiness have had any demoralizing effect upon you as yet. Your touch is as delicate and vigorous and your invention as rich as ever: and I am still in hope that your greatest poem of all has not yet been written. Some years ago, when you were in want of a subject, I recommended Job. The argument of Job, to be treated as you treat the legends of Arthur, as freely and with as much light of modern thought as you find fit. As we know it now, it is only half intelligible, and must be full of blunders and passages misunderstood. Probably also the peculiar character of the oriental style would at any rate stand in the way and prevent it from producing its proper effect upon the modern and western mind. Yet we can see through all the confusion what a great argument it is, and I think it was never more wanted than now. If you would take it in hand, and tell it in verse in your own way, without any scruples about improving on Scripture, I believe it would be the greatest poem in the language. The controversy is as much alive to-day in London as it could ever have been in the place where and the time when it was composed, of which, as the author, I am altogether ignorant. And the voice out of the whirlwind may speak without fear of anachronisms.
My own book,[109] though there is only one volume this time, is much bigger than yours. It is wrapped up ready to go by the book-post, and only wants to know to which of your many mansions it is to be directed.
Fitz’s box, which is about as large as a tailor’s box for a single suit, contains a drawing of Thackeray’s, an illustration of the “Lord of Burghley,” a pretty sketch of the landskip-painter and the village maiden. He sent it here under the vain delusion that whenever you happened to come to London I should be sure to know. And I presume he sent word to you of what he had done, for he did not ask me to communicate the fact. I was only to write to him in case the box did not arrive, and as the box did arrive I did not write. If you will let me know what you wish to be done with it, I will do with it accordingly.
There is a line in your last volume which I can’t read: the last line but one of the “flower in the crannied wall.”
In the course of the same year he edited the Conference of Pleasure, written by Bacon for some masque or festive occasion, and printed from a MS. belonging to the Duke of Northumberland which had been slightly injured by fire. FitzGerald, in a letter to me, says of it:
Spedding’s Introduction to his grilled Bacon, I call it really a beautiful little Idyll, the mechanical Job done so perfectly and so elegantly.
But while he was engaged in the great labour of his life he found time to write beautiful pieces of criticism on Shakespeare to which FitzGerald would willingly have had him devote his whole attention. “I never heard him read a page,” he writes to Sir Frederick Pollock, “but he threw some new light upon it.” In the Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1850 he contributed a paper on “Who wrote Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.?” which he discussed with characteristic thoroughness. His conclusion was that it was the work of two authors, one of whom was Fletcher, and this was confirmed by the investigations of another enquirer, who independently arrived at substantially the same result. The division of the Acts in Much Ado, Twelfth Night, Richard II., and King Lear formed the subject of other discussions, and these he considered his most valuable contribution to the restoration of Shakespeare. A criticism of Miss Kate Terry’s acting in Viola gave him the opportunity of pointing out the corruptions by which the fine comedy, Twelfth Night, has been degraded into farce.
“Spedding says,” FitzGerald writes in 1875 to Fanny Kemble, “that Irving’s Hamlet is simply—hideous—a strong expression for Spedding to use. But—(lest I should think his condemnation was only the Old Man’s fault of depreciating all that is new) he extols Miss Ellen Terry’s Portia as simply a perfect Performance: remembering (he says) all the while how fine was Fanny Kemble’s.”