There is another Epicurean, with whose tenets he might have been thought to show even more sympathy—the easy-going poet-critic Horace. Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam is the constant burden of FitzGerald’s strain. His friendship, early formed, with Tennyson, the contrast of their divergent views, might be compared with the friendship of Horace and Virgil. For Virgil, too, began as an Epicurean. But FitzGerald was not content with Horace. “Why is it,” he wrote, “that I can never take up with Horace, so sensible, agreeable, elegant, and sometimes even grand?” It was, perhaps, just that masculine and worldly element that put him off. Yet he not seldom quotes Horace, and perhaps liked him better than he knew. “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,” he wrote in a copy of Polonius which he gave to a special friend, and Nature was what he was always seeking in poetry. Still he preferred Virgil, just as he really preferred Tennyson.
Though he was destined to produce a poem which bids as fair for immortality as any of its time, he did not think highly of his own powers as a poet. But he did plume himself on being a critic. “I pretend to no Genius,” he said, “but to Taste, which according to my aphorism is the feminine of Genius.” This was another gift in common. Tennyson was himself a consummate critic, as FitzGerald was the first to recognize.
FitzGerald had his limitations and his prejudices—his “crotchets.” He did not like many even of those whom the world has agreed to admire. He did not like Euripides or even Homer. With Goethe’s poems he could not get on. He eschewed Victor Hugo. He liked, indeed, very little of the prose and none of the poetry of his contemporaries, except that of the Tennysons. He could not away with Browning. Arnold, he wrote down “a pedant.” He thought very little of Rossetti and Swinburne, though the former, especially, was a great admirer not only of Omar but of Jami and some of the Spanish translations. He tried to read Morris’s Jason, but said, “No go.” He “could not read the Adam Bedes and the Daisy Chains.” All this must be remembered when we read his criticism of Tennyson’s later work which belonged to the period of these writers and their productions. But within certain limits he was a very fine critic. It cannot be said of him as of his special favourite among Greek poets, Sophocles, that
He saw life steadily and saw it whole.
As he was aware himself, he by no means saw it whole. But with his detachment and his critical gift, it may, perhaps, be said:
He saw life lazily, but saw it plain.
To the question of Browning’s merits, or want of merits, he is always returning. A very characteristic letter is a long, discursive one, written to Tennyson himself in 1867:
Markethill, Woodbridge,
November 3rd, 1867.
My dear old Alfred—I abuse Browning myself; and get others to abuse him; and write to you about it; for the sake of easing my own heart—not yours. Why is it (as I asked Mrs. Tennyson) that, while the Magazine critics are belauding him, not one of the men I know, who are not inferior to the writers in the Athenæum, Edinburgh, etc., can endure, and (for the most part) can read him at all? I mean his last poem. Thus it has been with the Cowells, Trinity Thompsons, Donnes, and some others whom you don’t know, but in whose candour and judgment I have equal confidence, men and women too.
Since I wrote to your wife, Pollock, a great friend of Browning’s, writes to me. “I agree with you about Browning and A. T. I can’t understand it. Ter conatus eram to get through the Ring and the Book—and failing to perform the feat in its totality, I have stooped to the humiliation to point out extracts for me (they having read it all quite through three times) and still could not do it. So I pretend to have read it, and let Browning so suppose when I talk to him about it. But don’t you be afraid”? (N.B. I am not, only angry) “things will come round, and A. T. will take his right place again, and R. B. will have all the honours due to his learning, wit and philosophy.”