E. F. G.
When I thought of you and Boccacio, I was sitting in the Sun on that same Iron Seat with the pigeons about us, and the Trees still in Leaf.
One of the poems after 1842 which he liked was the “Ode on the Duke of Wellington,” though characteristically he made a somewhat fastidious criticism on the “vocalization” of the opening.
“I mumble over your old verses in my memory as often as any one’s,” he wrote, “and was lately wishing you had found bigger vowels for the otherwise fine opening of the Duke’s Funeral:
’Twas at the Royal Feast for Persia won, etc.
(Dryden.)
Bury the great Duke, etc.
(A. T.)
So you see I am always the same crotchetty
Fitz.”
The paradox is that it was FitzGerald who was always urging “Alfred” to go on, and finding fault with him for not doing more, and not singing in grander, sterner strains,—not becoming the Tyrtaeus of his country. In truth, Tennyson’s strength and physical force and his splendid appearance in youth, added to his mental grandeur, seem to have deeply impressed his youthful contemporaries. He was, they felt, heroic, and made for heroic songs and deeds. When he did go on, in his own way, FitzGerald did not like it, or only half liked it. For Tennyson did go forward on his own lines. He had not a little to daunt and deter him. He, too, had his sensitiveness and capacity for feeling and passion not less exquisite than FitzGerald’s own. FitzGerald said his friendships were more like loves. He was not alone in this attitude. “What passions our friendships were,” wrote Thackeray, another of the set, the early friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. But of no friendship could such language be used more truly than of that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. When, however, the sundering blow fell, and the friendship which was a love lay shattered, Tennyson braced himself and went on. For
It becomes no man to nurse despair,
But in the teeth of clench’d antagonisms
To follow up the worthiest till he die.
His faith, even to the last, was still at times dashed with doubt, for, with “the universality of his mind,” he could not help seeing many sides of a question. But he “followed the Gleam,” as he has himself described. FitzGerald did the opposite. He drifted, he dallied, he delayed, he despaired. He ruined his own life in great measure by his marriage. His early ambitions seemed to wither prematurely, and he let his career slide. Yet he was always, as Mr. A. C. Benson has excellently brought out, admirable in his sincerity, his friendly kindliness, his innocence, his conscientious adherence to his literary standards. Too much has been made of his unconventionality, his slovenliness and slackness, his love of low or common company. He remained a gentleman and a man of business. Thackeray, a man of the world, when he was starting for America, wanted to leave him the legal guardian of his daughters. He was an Epicurean, not a Pyrrhonist. He took life seriously. He showed at times an austerity of spirit which was surprising. His Omar has often, and naturally, been compared to Lucretius and to Ecclesiastes. There is probably more of Lucretius about the poem, but more of Ecclesiastes about the translator.