TENNYSON, FITZGERALD, CARLYLE, AND OTHER FRIENDS
By Dr. Warren, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and now Professor of Poetry
| Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange, Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling Orb of change, And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see as there you sit Beneath your sheltering garden-tree And watch your doves about you flit, And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee, Or on your head their rosy feet, As if they knew your diet spares Whatever moved in that full sheet Let down to Peter at his prayers. ······· And so I send a birthday line Of greeting; and my son, who dipt In some forgotten book of mine With sallow scraps of manuscript, And dating many a year ago, Has hit on this, which you will take My Fitz, and welcome, as I know Less for its own than for the sake Of one recalling gracious times, When, in our younger London days, You found some merit in my rhymes, And I more pleasure in your praise. To E. FitzGerald (Tiresias and other Poems, p. 1). |
Alfred Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald; In Memoriam and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; “The Eternal Yea” and “The Eternal No,” “the larger hope” and “the desperate sort of thing unfortunately at the bottom of all thinking men’s minds, made Music of”—few friendships, few conjunctions, personal or literary, could be more interesting or more piquant.
What adds to the interest of the friendship is that it remained so long unknown to the literary or the general world, and is even now, perhaps, only partially appreciated. Yet it subsisted for nearly fifty years. It was close and constant. Though, as time went on, the two friends met less and less often, it was maintained by a steady interchange of letters and messages. The letters were naturally more on FitzGerald’s side. Like most, though not perhaps quite all good letter-writers, FitzGerald was a great letter-writer. He was, as he often said, an idle man, and as he also said, he rather liked writing letters, “unlike most Englishmen (but I am Irish),” he added. Indeed, he seemed almost to prefer communication with his friends by letter to personal meetings, though these he enjoyed greatly when brought to the point.
Tennyson and FitzGerald were old friends, born in the same year, the notable year 1809. It is true that though they were at Cambridge together they were not then known to each other, except by sight. “I remember him there well,” said FitzGerald, speaking of Tennyson, “a sort of Hyperion.” They had many friendships, acquaintances, associations in common. Carlyle, Thackeray, Spedding, Merivale, Trench, W. H. Thompson, J. D. Allen, W. B. Donne, Brookfield, Cowell, Mrs. Kemble, Samuel Laurence, were known to them both. In their formative years they fell under the same influences, and read many of the same books. It was about 1835 that they became acquainted. They were brought together probably by their common and uncommon friend, James Spedding. They certainly met at his father’s house, Mirehouse, near Bassenthwaite Lake, in the spring of 1835.
Tennyson had begun writing “In Memoriam” a little before this, i.e. early in 1834, soon after his friend Hallam’s sudden death and sad home-bringing in the winter of 1833. He kept it on the stocks, as all know, for some seventeen years. It was published, at first anonymously, in 1850. The secret of its authorship was soon revealed, the poem found immediate acceptance and popularity. It became and has remained one of the most widely read poems in the language. In the meantime Tennyson, though not so famous as “In Memoriam” made him, had become well known through the 1842 volumes.
FitzGerald, on the contrary, was at that time quite unknown, except by his friendships, and to his friends. An Irishman, with the easygoing and dolce far niente qualities which so often temper the brilliant genius of that race, sufficiently provided with means, he was naturally inclined for a quiet and easy, not to say indolent life. He deliberately chose from the first the fallentis semita vitae. He had some literary ambitions, and he wrote a few early poems, one or two of rare promise and beauty. One gift in particular was his—not, it is true, always leading him to action, yet in its passive or dynamic form constant and abundant almost to excess—loyalty in friendship. Once and fatally, it led him to take or submit to a positive step. He had been the attached friend of Bernard Barton the Quaker poet, the friend of Charles Lamb. When Barton died, from a mistaken sense of duty, FitzGerald not only collected his poems, a task more pious than profitable, but afterward, having meanwhile hesitated and halted too long in offering himself to one who was his real love, married his daughter who was not this. He left her, not indeed as is sometimes said, on the morrow of the wedding, but after separations and repeated attempts—in town and country—at reunion, and lived, as he had done before, alone and somewhat drearily ever afterwards.