Letters of Edward FitzGerald
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Edward FitzGerald >> Letters of Edward FitzGerald
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Mrs. Schutz is much delighted with the books you got for her: and still
enquires if you hurt your health in searching. This she does in all
simplicity and kindness. She has been very ill all the winter: but I see
by a letter I have just had from her that her mind is still cheerful and
the same. The _mens sana in corpore sano_ of old age is most to be
wondered at.
_To Bernard Barton_. {50a}
LONDON, _April_, 1838.
DEAR SIR,
John, {50b} who is going down into Suffolk, will I hope take this letter
and despatch it to you properly. I write more on account of this
opportunity than of anything I have to say: for I am very heavy indeed
with a kind of Influenza, which has blocked up most of my senses, and put
a wet blanket over my brains. This state of head has not been improved
by trying to get through a new book much in fashion--Carlyle's French
Revolution--written in a German style. An Englishman writes of French
Revolutions in a German style. People say the book is very deep: but it
appears to me that the meaning _seems_ deep from lying under mystical
language. There is no repose, nor equable movement in it: all cut up
into short sentences half reflective, half narrative; so that one labours
through it as vessels do through what is called a short sea--small,
contrary going waves caused by shallows, and straits, and meeting tides,
etc. I like to sail before the wind over the surface of an even-rolling
eloquence, like that of Bacon or the Opium Eater. There is also pleasant
fresh water sailing with such writers as Addison; is there any _pond_-
sailing in literature? that is, drowsy, slow, and of small compass?
Perhaps we may say, some Sermons. But this is only conjecture. Certainly
Jeremy Taylor rolls along as majestically as any of them. We have had
Alfred Tennyson here; very droll, and very wayward: and much sitting up
of nights till two and three in the morning with pipes in our mouths: at
which good hour we would get Alfred to give us some of his magic music,
which he does between growling and smoking; and so to bed. All this has
not cured my Influenza as you may imagine: but these hours shall be
remembered long after the Influenza is forgotten.
I have bought scarce any new books or prints: and am not sorry to see
that I want so little more. One large purchase I have made however, the
Biographie Universelle, 53 Octavo Volumes. It contains everything, and
is the very best thing of its kind, and so referred to by all historians,
etc. Surely nothing is more pleasant than, when some name crosses one,
to go and get acquainted with the owner of the name: and this Biographie
really has found places for people whom one would have thought almost too
small for so comprehensive a work--which sounds like a solecism, or Bull,
does it not?
Now I must finish my letter: and a very stupid one it is. Here is a
sentence of Warburton's that, I think, is very wittily expressed: though
why I put it in here is not very discoverable. 'The Church, like the Ark
of Noah, is worth saving: not for the sake of the unclean beasts that
almost filled it, and probably made most noise and clamour in it, but for
the little corner of rationality, that was as much distressed by the
stink within, as by the tempest without.' Is it not good? It is out of
his letters: {52} and the best thing in them. It is also the best thing
in mine.
With kind remembrances to Miss Barton, believe me, Yours very
affectionately
E. FITZGERALD.
[LONDON, 8 _June_, 1838.]
DEAR SIR,
I have just come home after accompanying my Father and Lusia to their
starting place in the City: they are off for Suffolk for some days. I
should have written to you by them: but I only just now found your letter
on the mantelpiece: there it has lain some days during which I have been
ruralising in Bedfordshire. Delicious has it been there: such weather,
such meadows, to enjoy: and the Ouse still wandering along at his ease
through pretty villages and vales of his own beautifying. I am much in
love with Bedfordshire: it beats our part of the world: and I am sure you
would like it. But here I am come back to London for another three weeks
I suppose. . . .
I should much like to see your Platonic Brother. By your account he must
have a very perfect mental organization: or, phrenologically speaking, he
must be fully and equally furnished with the bumps of ideality and
causality: which, as Bacon would say, are the two extreme poles on which
the perfect 'sound and roundabout' intellect is balanced. A great
deficiency of the causality bump causes me to break short in a long
discussion which I meant to have favoured you with on this subject. I
hope to meet your Brother one of these days: and to learn much from him.
'Guesses at Truth' I know very well: the two Brothers are the Hares: one
a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; the other Author of some Sermons
which I think you had from me this winter. 'The Guesses' are well worth
reading; nay, buying: very ingenious, with a good deal of pedantry and
_onesidedness_ (do you know this German word?), which, I believe, chiefly
comes from the Trinity Fellow, who was a great pedant. I have just read
Mrs. Austin's Characteristics of Goethe: which I will bring for you when
I come. It is well worth knowing something of the mind of certainly a
great man, and who has had more effect on his age than any one else.
There is something almost fearful in the energy of his intellect. I wish
indeed you were in London to see all these pictures: I am sure their
greatness would not diminish your pleasure in your own small collection.
Why should it? There is as genuine a feeling of Nature in one of
Nursey's sketches as in the Rubenses and Claudes here: and if that is
evident, and serves to cherish and rekindle one's own sympathy with the
world about one, the great end is accomplished. I do not know very much
of Salvator: is he not rather a melodramatic painter? No doubt, very
fine in his way. But Claude and the two Poussins are the great ideal
painters of Landscape. Nature looks more stedfast in them than in other
painters: all is wrought up into a quietude and harmony that seem
eternal. This is also one of the mysterious charms in the Holy Families
of Raffaelle and of the early painters before him: the faces of the
Madonnas are beyond the discomposure of passion, and their very draperies
betoken an Elysian atmosphere where wind never blew. The best painter of
the unideal Christ is, I think, Rembrandt: as one may see in his picture
at the National Gallery, and that most wonderful one of our Saviour and
the Disciples at Emmaus in the Louvre: there they sit at supper as they
might have sat. Rubens and the Venetian Painters did neither one thing
nor the other: their Holy figures are neither ideal nor real: and it is
incongruous to see one of Rubens' brawny boors dressed up in the ideal
red and blue drapery with which the early Italians clothed their figures
of Christ. But enough of all this. I have seen Trench's Sabbation, and
like it much: how do you like those centuries of couplets, which are a
German fashion? They are very much in the style of Quarles' Emblems, and
other pithy epigrams of that time: only doubtless more artistically
polished: perhaps profounder. There were some of the same kind in
Blackwood some months ago. My paper is out: and I must again say Good
Bye.
_To John Allen_.
LOWESTOFT, SUFFOLK.
_August_ 28 [1838.]
DEAR ALLEN,
. . . When I left town I went into Bedfordshire and loitered about there
and in Northamptonshire till ten days ago: when I came to join my sisters
at this watering place on the Suffolk coast. I have been spending a very
pleasant time; but the worst of it is that the happier I am with Browne
the sorrier I am to leave him. To put off this most evil day I have
brought him out of Bedfordshire here: and here we are together in a
pleasant lodging looking out upon the sea, teaching a great black dog to
fetch and carry, playing with our neighbour's children, doing the first
five propositions of Euclid (which _I_ am teaching him!), shooting gulls
on the shore, going out in boats, etc. All this must have an end: and as
usual my pleasure in his stay is proportionably darkened by the
anticipation of his going, and go he must in a very few days. Well,
Carlyle told us that we are not to expect to be so happy. I have thought
once or twice how equally happy I was with you by the seaside at Tenby.
You and Browne (though in rather different ways) have certainly made me
more happy than any men living. Sometimes I behave very ill to him, and
am much ashamed of myself: but enough of this.
I have been to see two shew places lately: Boughton in Northamptonshire,
a seat of the Duke of Buccleugh's, of the Versailles or Clare Hall style
of building, in a very great park planted with the longest avenues I ever
saw. But I thought the whole affair gloomy and deserted. There are some
fine pictures: and two cartoons said to be by Raffaelle: of which one is
the vision of Ezechiel--I could not judge of their genuineness. The
other place I have seen is Woburn Abbey--the Duke of Bedford's--a fine
place but not much to my taste either. There are very fine pictures
there of all kinds--one room hung with brilliant Canalettis--and
altogether the pictures are better arranged and hung than in any place I
have seen. But these kind of places have not much character in them: an
old Squire's gable-ended house is much more English and aristocratic to
my mind. I wish you had been with me and Browne at an old seat of Lord
Dysart's, Helmingham in Suffolk, the other day. There is a portrait
there of the present Lady Dysart in the prime of her beauty, by Sir
Joshua. She is now 95.
. . . I am reading Pindar now and then: I don't much care about him I
must say: though I suppose he is the very best writer in the Poet
Laureate style: that is, writing on occasion for so much money. I see
great merits doubtless--a concise and simple way of saying great things,
etc., but the subjects are not interesting enough to me. I suppose a
good poet could have celebrated Dutch Sam {57} as having been descended
from King William the Third just as well as Pindar glorifies his boxers
with the mythical histories of the AEacidae, Heraclidae, etc. . . .
_To Frederic Tennyson_.
GELDESTONE HALL, BECCLES,
[_April_ 10, 1839.]
MY DEAR TENNYSON,
I see in the last Atlas a notice of the first Concert of the Societa
Armonica--there were you to be found of course seated in black velvet
waistcoat (for I hope you remember these are dress concerts) on one of
the benches, grumbling at most of the music. You had a long symphony of
Beethoven's in B flat--I forget how it goes, but doubtless there was much
good in it. The overture to Egmont is also a fine thing. The Atlas
(which is the best weekly critic of Music and all other things that I
know of) gives great [Greek text] to the Societa Armonica: especially
this season, as the Directors seem determined to replace Donizetti and
Mercadante by Mozart and Rossini, in the vocal department. A good change
doubtless. I hear no music now: except that for the last week I have
been staying with Spring Rice's mother in-law Mrs. Frere, {58} one of the
finest judges of Music I know. She was a very fine singer: but her voice
fails now. We used to look over the score of Don Giovanni together, and
many a mystery and mastery of composition did she shew me in it. Now
then there is enough of Music. I wish you would write me a letter, which
you can do now and then if you will take it into your head, and let me
know how you and my dear old Morton are, and whether you dine and smoke
together as heretofore. If you won't write, tell him to do so: or make
up a letter between you. What new pictures are there to be seen? Have
you settled yet whether spirit can exist separately from matter? Are you
convinced of the truth of Murphy's Almanac this year? Have you learned
any more Astronomy? I live on in a very seedy way, reading occasionally
in books which every one else has gone through at school: and what I do
read is just in the same way as ladies work: to pass the time away. For
little remains in my head. I dare say you think it very absurd that an
idle man like me should poke about here in the country, when I might be
in London seeing my friends: but such is the humour of the beast. But it
is not always to be the case: I shall see your good physiognomy one of
these days, and smoke one of your cigars, and listen to Morton saying
fine and wild things, 'startling the dull ear of night' with paradoxes
that perhaps are truisms in the world where spirits exist independent of
matter. You two men have made great commotion in my mind, and left your
marks upon it, I can tell you: more than most of the books I read. What
is Alfred about, and where is he? Present my homage to him. Don't you
rather rejoice in the pickle the King of the French finds himself in? I
don't know why, but I have a sneaking dislike of the old knave. How he
must pine to summon up Talleyrand's Ghost, and what a Ghost it must be,
wherever it is!
_To John Allen_.
[28 _April_, 1839.]
MY DEAR ALLEN,
Some one from this house is going to London: and I will try and write you
some lines now in half an hour before dinner: I am going out for the
evening to my old lady who teaches me the names of the stars, and other
chaste information. {59} You see, Master John Allen, that if I do not
come to London (and I have no thought of going yet) and you will not
write, there is likely to be an end of our communication: not by the way
that I am never to go to London again: but not just yet. Here I live
with tolerable content: perhaps with as much as most people arrive at,
and what if one were properly grateful one would perhaps call perfect
happiness. Here is a glorious sunshiny day: all the morning I read about
Nero in Tacitus lying at full length on a bench in the garden: a
nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun manfully not
far off. A funny mixture all this: Nero, and the delicacy of Spring: all
very human however. Then at half past one lunch on Cambridge cream
cheese: then a ride over hill and dale: then spudding up some weeds from
the grass: and then coming in, I sit down to write to you, my sister
winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the most delightful
little girl in the world chattering incessantly. So runs the world away.
You think I live in Epicurean ease: but this happens to be a jolly day:
one isn't always well, or tolerably good, the weather is not always
clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity.
But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it. . . .
Give my love to Thackeray from your upper window across the street. {60a}
So he has lost a little child: and moreover has been sorry to do so.
Well, good-bye my dear John Allen: Auld Lang Syne. My kind regards to
your Lady.
Down to the vale this water steers,
How merrily it goes:
'T will murmur on a thousand years,
And flow as now it flows. {60b}
E. F. G.
GELDESTONE HALL, BECCLES.
_To Bernard Barton_.
BEDFORD, _July_ 24, 1839.
DEAR BARTON,
. . . I have brought down here with me Sydney Smith's Works, now first
collected: you will delight in them: I shall bring them to Suffolk when I
come: and it will not be long, I dare say, before I come, as there is to
be rather a large meeting of us at Boulge this August. I have got the
fidgets in my right arm and hand (how the inconvenience redoubles as one
mentions it)--do you know what the fidgets are?--a true ailment, though
perhaps not a dangerous one. Here I am again in the land of old
Bunyan--better still in the land of the more perennial Ouse, making many
a fantastic winding and going much out of his direct way to fertilize and
adorn. Fuller supposes that he lingers thus in the pleasant fields of
Bedfordshire, being in no hurry to enter the more barren fens of
Lincolnshire. So he says. This house is just on the edge of the town: a
garden on one side skirted by the public road which again is skirted by a
row of such Poplars as only the Ouse knows how to rear--and pleasantly
they rustle now--and the room in which I write is quite cool and opens
into a greenhouse which opens into said garden: and it's all deuced
pleasant. For in half an hour I shall seek my Piscator, {61a} and we
shall go to a Village {61b} two miles off and fish, and have tea in a pot-
house, and so walk home. For all which idle ease I think I must be
damned. I begin to have dreadful suspicions that this fruitless way of
life is not looked upon with satisfaction by the open eyes above. One
really ought to dip for a little misery: perhaps however all this ease is
only intended to turn sour by and bye, and so to poison one by the very
nature of self-indulgence. Perhaps again as idleness is so very great a
trial of virtue, the idle man who keeps himself tolerably chaste, etc.,
may deserve the highest reward; the more idle, the more deserving. Really
I don't jest: but I don't propound these things as certain.
There is a fair review of Shelley in the new Edinburgh: saying the truth
on many points where the truth was not easily enunciated, as I believe.
Now, dear sir, I have said all I have to say: and Carlyle says, you know,
it is dangerous to attempt to say more. So farewell for the present: if
you like to write soon, direct to the Post Office, Bedford: if not, I
shall soon be at Woodbridge to anticipate the use of your pen.
HALVERSTOWN, {62} _Sunday_, Oct. 20, [1839].
MY DEAR SIR,
I am very glad that you lifted yourself at last from your mahogany desk,
and took such a trip as you describe in your last letter. I don't think
you could have made a better in the same given space of time. It is some
years since I have seen the Castle at Windsor, except from Eton. The
view from the Terrace is the noblest I know of, taking it with all its
associations together. Gray's Ode rises up into the mind as one looks
around--does it not?--a sure proof that, however people may condemn
certain conceits and expressions in the poem, the spirit of it is
genuine. 'Ye distant spires, ye antique towers'--very large and noble,
like the air that breathes upon one as one looks down along the view. My
brother John told me he thought the Waterloo gallery very fine: the
portraits by Sir Thomas almost as fine as Vandyke. You saw them, of
course. You say nothing of having seen the National Gallery in London:
indeed I rather fear it is closed these two months. This is a great loss
to you: the Rubens landscape you would never have forgot. Thank you for
the picture of my dear old Bredfield which you have secured for me: it is
most welcome. Poor Nursey once made me a very pretty oil sketch of it:
but I gave it to Mr. Jenney. By all means have it engraved for the
pocket book: it is well worthy. Some of the tall ash trees about it used
to be visible at sea: but I think their topmost branches are decayed now.
This circumstance I put in, because it will tell in your verse
illustration of the view. From the road before the lawn, people used
plainly to see the topmasts of the men-of war lying in Hollesley bay
during the war. I like the idea of this: the old English house holding
up its enquiring chimneys and weather cocks (there is great physiognomy
in weathercocks) toward the far-off sea, and the ships upon it. How well
I remember when we used all to be in the Nursery, and from the window see
the hounds come across the lawn, my Father and Mr. Jenney in their
hunting caps, etc., with their long whips--all Daguerreotyped into the
mind's eye now--and that is all. Perhaps you are not civilised enough to
know what Daguerreotype is: no more do I well. We were all going on here
as merrily as possible till this day week, when my Piscator got an order
from his Father to go home direct!) So go he would the day after. I
wanted to go also: but they would have me stay here ten days more. So I
stay: I suppose I shall be in London toward the end of this week however:
and then it will not be long before I pay you a visit. . . .
I have gone through Homer's Iliad--sorry to have finished it. The
accounts of the Zoolu people, with Dingarn their king, etc., {64} give
one a very good idea of the Homeric heroes, who were great brutes: but
superior to the Gods who governed them: which also has been the case with
most nations. It is a lucky thing that God made Man, and that Man has
not to make God: we should fare badly, judging by the specimens already
produced--Frankenstein Monster Gods, formed out of the worst and
rottenest scraps of humanity--gigantic--and to turn destructively upon
their Creators--
'But be ye of good cheer! I have overcome the world--'
So speaks a gentle voice.
I found here a Number of Tait's Magazine for August last, containing a
paper on Southey, Wordsworth, etc., by De Quincey. Incomplete and
disproportioned like his other papers: but containing two noble passages:
one, on certain years of his own Life when Opium shut him out from the
world; the other, on Southey's style: in which he tells a truth which is
obvious, directly it is told. Tait seems to be very well worth a
shilling a month: that is the price of him, I see. You have bought
Carlyle's Miscellanies, have you not? I long to get them: but one must
wait till they are out of print before the Dublin booksellers shall have
heard of them. Now here is really a very long letter, and what is more,
written with a pen of my own mending--more consolatory to me than to you.
Mr. Macnish's inscription {65} for Milton is--
His lofty spirit was the home
Of inspirations high,
A mighty temple whose great dome
Was hidden in the sky.
Who Mr. Macnish is, I don't know. Didn't he write some Essays on
Drunkenness once? or on Dreams?
Farewell for the present, my dear Sir. We shall soon shake hands again.
Ever yours,
E. FITZGERALD.
_To John Allen_.
BOULGE, WOODBRIDGE,
[4 _April_, 1840]
MY DEAR ALLEN,
. . . The country is now showing symptoms of greenness and warmth.
Yesterday I walked (not a common thing for me) eleven miles; partly over
a heath, covered with furze bushes just come out into bloom, whose odour
the fresh wind blew into my face. Such a day it was, only not so warm as
when you and I used to sit on those rocks overlooking the sea at Tenby,
just eight years ago. I am afraid you are growing too good a Christian
for me, Master Allen, if you know what I mean by that. Don't be alarmed
however. I have just read the first number of Dickens' new work {66a}:
it does not promise much, I think.
Love to all Coram Street. {66b}
_To Frederic Tennyson_.
THE CORPORATE TOWN OF BEDFORD,
_June_ 7, 1840.
DEAR FREDERIC,
Your letter dated from the Eternal City on the 15th of May reached me
here two days ago. Perhaps you have by this time left Naples to which
you bid me direct: or will have left it by the time my letter gets there.
. . . Our letters are dated from two very different kinds of places: but
perhaps equally well suited to the genius of the two men. For I am
becoming more hebete every hour: and have not even the ambition to go up
to London all this spring to see the Exhibitions, etc. I live in general
quietly at my brother-in-law's in Norfolk {67} and I look with tolerable
composure on vegetating there for some time to come, and in due time
handing out my eldest nieces to waltz, etc., at the County Balls. People
affect to talk of this kind of life as very beautiful and philosophical:
but I don't: men ought to have an ambition to stir, and travel, and fill
their heads and senses: but so it is. Enough of what is now generally
called the subjective style of writing. This word has made considerable
progress in England during the year you have been away, so that people
begin to fancy they understand what it means. I have been striving at
it, because it is a very _sine qua non_ condition in a book which I have
just been reading, Eastlake's translation of Goethe's Theory of Colours.
I recommend it to you, when you can get hold of it. Come back to England
quick and read my copy. Goethe is all in opposition to Newton: and
reduces the primitive colours to two. Whewell, I believe, does not
patronise it: but it is certainly very Baconically put together. While
you are wandering among ruins, waterfalls, and temples, and contemplating
them as you sit in your lodgings, I poke about with a book and a colour-
box by the side of the river Ouse--quiet scenery enough--and make
horrible sketches. The best thing to me in Italy would be that you are
there. But I hope you will soon come home and install yourself again in
Mornington Crescent. I have just come from Leamington: while there, I
met Alfred by chance: we made two or three pleasant excursions together:
to Stratford upon Avon and Kenilworth, etc. Don't these names sound very
thin amid your warm southern nomenclature? But I'll be bound you would
be pleased to exchange all your fine burnt up places for a look at a
Warwickshire pasture every now and then during these hot days. . . .
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