Letters of Edward FitzGerald

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Yesterday I was busily employed in painting over my Opie, which had
suffered by heat, or something of that kind. I borrowed Laurence's
palette and brushes and lay upon the floor two hours patching over and
renovating. The picture is really greatly improved, and I am more
reconciled to it. It has now to be varnished: and then I hope some fool
will be surprised into giving 4 pounds for it, as I did. I have selected
an advantageous position for it in a dealer's shop, just under a rich
window that excludes the light.

On second thoughts I shall not send you down my Twilight: but bring it
with me. I like it much, and do not repent the purchase. As to the
difficulty of bringing down so many pictures, I shall travel by the
steamer; which will bear any quantity. The great new purchase, spoken of
in yesterday's letter, will also go with me: it will be insured at a high
valuation before it is entrusted to the Deep, of whose treasures I don't
at all wish it to become one. My Titian is a great hit: if not by him,
it is as near him as ever was painted. But you would not care six straws
for it. The history of the finest theory of colouring lies in those few
inches of canvas. But Laurence (who has gone for some days into the
country) must see it, and tell me about it. He is so good a judge, that
I ought never to talk till I have first heard his verdict.

I was amused at a passage in Clarissa the other day, which gives one some
idea of what the average state of the arts was among the gentry of a
hundred years ago. Miss Howe, in drawing up a character of her lost
Clarissa, says that among other things she had a fine taste for the
Pencil: had not time to practise it much, but 'was an absolute mistress
of the "should be,"' and then proceeds thus: 'To give a familiar instance
for the sake of young Ladies: she (untaught) observed _when but a child_,
that the Sun, Moon, and Stars, never appeared at once: and were therefore
never to be in one piece: that bears, tygers, lions, were not natives of
an English climate, and should not therefore have a place in an English
landscape: that these ravagers of the forest consorted not with lambs,
kids, or fawns: nor kites, hawks, or vultures, with doves, partridges,
and pheasants.' Such was a prodigy in those days. It is easy to sneer
at this passage: but whoever has read anything of the Masques, etc., of
James's time, will readily recall what absurdities were brought together,
even by the good Scholars of the day: and therefore will not wonder at
the imperfect Natural History that was found in young Ladies' Drawings,
and samplers. I remember now to have seen wonderful combinations of
phenomena in those samplers which are occasionally to be found hung up in
the parlours of Country Inns, and Farm houses.

These letters succeed like the ghosts of Banquo's progeny before the eyes
of Macbeth. Lucky that time itself draws on too close for this letter to
'hold a glass that shews you many more.' You did not answer my question
about the Gainsboroughs. So I won't ask you another.

SONNET ON MY NEW PICTURE.

Oh Twilight! Twilight!!

Rot me, if I am in a poetical humour: I can't translate the picture into
words.

LONDON, _March_ 5, 1842.

MY DEAR BARTON,

Before the cavalcade and suite of Hardinge's (a melancholy procession)
reaches you, I think this letter will. You need not envy me my
purchases, which are imprudent ones: both because I can't well afford
them, and because I have no house to put them. And yet all this gives a
sense of stolen enjoyment to them. I am yet haunted with the ghost of a
Battle-piece (little in my way) at a shop in Holborn: by whom I know not:
but so good as to be cheap at 4 pounds: 10_s._, which the man wants for
it. My Twilight _is_ an upright picture: about a foot wide, and rather
more than a foot high.

Mr. Browne has declined taking my Opie, unless in conjunction with some
others which I won't part with: so the Forest Girl must set up her stall
at a Broker's. I doubt she will never bring me the money I gave for her.
She is the only bad speculation of the season. Were she but sold, I
should be rejoicing in the Holborn Battle Piece. After this year however
I think I shall bid complete adieu to picture-_hunting_: only taking what
comes in my way. There is a great difference between these two things:
both in the expense of time, thought, and money. Who can sit down to
Plato while his brains are roaming to Holborn, Christie's, Phillips's,
etc.?

My Father talks of going down to Suffolk early next week. Whether I
shall accompany him is not certain. Do you remember what a merry Good
Friday you and I passed last year? I suppose I shall find the banks
covered with primroses, the very name carries a dew upon it.

'As one who long in populous city pent, etc.' {111}

Good-bye. I am going to pay my compliments at Portland Place, and then
to walk in a contrary direction to Holborn.

_To F. Tennyson_.

[31 _March_, 1842.]

DEAR FREDERIC,

. . . Concerning the bagwigs of composers. Handel's was not a bagwig,
which was simply so named from the little stuffed black silk watch-pocket
that hung down behind the back of the wearer. Such were Haydn's and
Mozart's--much less influential on the character: much less ostentatious
in themselves: not towering so high, nor rolling down in following curls
so low as to overlay the nature of the brain within. But Handel wore the
Sir Godfrey Kneller wig: greatest of wigs: one of which some great
General of the day used to take off his head after the fatigue of the
battle, and hand over to his valet to have the bullets combed out of it.
Such a wig was a fugue in itself. I don't understand your theory about
trumpets, which have always been so little spiritual _in use_, that they
have been the provocatives and celebrators of physical force from the
beginning of the world. '_Power_,' whether spiritual or physical, is the
meaning of the trumpet: and so, well used, as you say, by Handel in his
approaches to the Deity. The fugue in the overture to the Messiah
expresses perhaps the thorny wandering ways of the world before the voice
of the one in the wilderness, and before 'Comfort ye my people, etc.'
Mozart, I agree with you, is the most universal musical genius: Beethoven
has been too analytical and erudite: but his inspiration is nevertheless
true. I have just read his Life by Moscheles: well worth reading. He
shewed no very decided preference for music when a child, though he was
the son of a composer: and I think that he was, strictly speaking, more
of a thinker than a musician. A great genius he was somehow. He was
very fond of reading: Plutarch and Shakespeare his great favourites. He
tried to think in music: almost to reason in music: whereas perhaps we
should be contented with _feeling_ in it. It can never speak very
definitely. There is that famous 'Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, etc.,'
in Handel: nothing can sound more simple and devotional: but it is only
lately adapted to these words, being originally (I believe) a love song
in Rodelinda. Well, lovers adore their mistresses more than their God.
Then the famous music of 'He layeth the beams of his chambers in the
waters, etc.,' was originally fitted to an Italian pastoral song--'Nasce
al bosco in rozza cuna, un felice pastorello, etc.' That part which
seems so well to describe 'and walketh on the wings of the wind' falls
happily in with 'e con l'aura di fortuna' with which this pastorello
sailed along. The character of the music is ease and largeness: as the
shepherd lived, so God Almighty walked on the wind. The music breathes
ease: but words must tell us who takes it easy. Beethoven's Sonata--Op.
14--is meant to express the discord and gradual atonement of two lovers,
or a man and his wife: and he was disgusted that every one did not see
what was meant: in truth, it expresses any resistance gradually
overcome--Dobson shaving with a blunt razor, for instance. Music is so
far the most universal language, that any one piece in a particular
strain symbolizes all the analogous phenomena spiritual or material--if
you can talk of spiritual phenomena. The Eroica symphony describes the
battle of the passions as well as of armed men. This is long and muddy
discourse: but the walls of Charlotte Street present little else,
especially during this last week of Lent, to twaddle about. The
Cambridge Dons have been up in town for the Easter vacation: so we have
smoked and talked over Peacock, Whewell, etc. Alfred is busy preparing a
new volume for the press: full of doubts, troubles, etc. The reviewers
will doubtless be at him: and with justice for many things: but some of
the poems will outlive the reviewers. Trench, Wordsworth, Campbell, and
Taylor, also appear in new volumes this Spring, and Milnes, I hear, talks
of publishing a popular edition of his poems. He means, a cheap one.
Nothing has been heard of Spedding: {114a} but we all conclude, from the
nature of the case, that he has not been scalped.

_To W. F. Pollock_. {114b}

BOULGE HALL, _May_ 11/42.

DEAR POLLOCK,

. . . I have just been reading the great Library of Athanasius. {114c}
Certainly only you and I and Thackeray understand it. When men like
Spedding quote to me such a passage as 'Athanasius alas is innocent of
many smiles, etc.,' they shew me they don't understand it. The beauty--if
one may dare to define--lies more in such expressions as 'adjusting the
beaks of the macaws, etc.' I have laughed outright (how seldom one does
this alone!) at the Bishops' meeting. 'Mr. Talboys--that candle behind
Dr. Allnut--really that I should be obliged--.' I suppose this would be
the most untranslateable book in the world. I never shall forget how I
laughed when I first read it.

[GELDESTONE HALL, 22 _May_ 1842.]

DEAR POLLOCK,

. . . So Alfred is come out. {115a} I agree with you quite about the
skipping-rope, etc. But the bald men {115b} of the Embassy would tell
you otherwise. I should not wonder if the whole theory of the Embassy,
perhaps the discovery of America itself, was involved in that very Poem.
Lord Bacon's, honesty may, I am sure, be found there. Alfred, whatever
he may think, cannot trifle--many are the disputes we have had about his
powers of badinage, compliment, waltzing, etc. His smile is rather a
grim one. I am glad the book is come out, though I grieve for the
insertion of these little things, on which reviewers and dull readers
will fix; so that the right appreciation of the book will be retarded a
dozen years. . . .

The rain will not come and we are burnt up, and in despair. But the
country never looked more delicious than it does. I am as happy here as
possible, though I don't like to boast. I am going to see my friend
Donne in ten days, he is writing the dullest of histories--one of Rome.
What the devil does it signify setting us in these days right as to the
Licinian Rogation, and Livy's myths? Every school-boy knew that Livy
lied; but the main story was clear enough for all the purposes of
experience; and, that being so, the more fabulous and entertaining the
subsidiary matter is the better. Tell Thackeray not to go into Punch
yet.

_To S. Laurence_.

GELDESTONE HALL, BECCLES.
SUNDAY, _May_ 22/42.

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

. . . I read of the advertisements of sales and auctions, but don't envy
you Londoners while I am here in the midst of _green idleness_, as Leigh
Hunt might call it. What are pictures? I am all for pure spirit. You
have of course read the account of Spedding's forehead landing in
America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it for Beachy
Head. There is a Shakespeare cliff, and a Spedding cliff. Good old
fellow! I hope he'll come back safe and sound, forehead and all.

I sit writing this at my bedroom window, while the rain (long-looked for)
patters on the window. I prophesied it to-day: which is a great comfort.
We have a housefull of the most delightful children: and if the rain
would last, and the grass grow, all would be well. I think the rain will
last: I shall prophesy so when I go down to our early dinner. For it is
Sunday: and we dine children and all at one o'clock: and go to afternoon
church, and a great tea at six--then a pipe (except for the young
ladies)--a stroll--a bit of supper--and to bed. Wake in the morning at
five--open the window and read Ecclesiasticus. A proverb says that
'everything is fun in the country.'

My Constable has been greatly admired, and is reckoned quite genuine by
our great judge, Mr. Churchyard. Mr. C. paints himself: (not in _body_
colours, as you waggishly insinuate) and nicely too. He understands
Gainsborough, Constable, and old Crome. Have you ever seen pictures by
the latter? some very fine. He was a Norwich man.

BOULGE HALL, _June_ 19/42.

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

Keep the head of Raffaelle as long as you please. I am glad that one of
the three pictures at all events is worth something. I anticipated that
Morton's friend would spoil them in the carriage: friends always do. Keep
them all, like my other pictures, at your house: and make what use of
them you please. The head of Dante is, I suppose, the same as the one L.
Hunt shewed us engraved in a book: a theatrical one, I thought. . . .
Have you been to any auction-rooms? I have forgot all about them: and
can live very well without pictures. I believe one loses all one's
tastes in the country: and one is not the less happy. We have had
glorious weather: new pease and young potatoes--fresh milk (how good!)
and a cool library to sit in of mornings. . . .

_To F. Tennyson_.

BEDFORD, _August_ 16, 1842.

DEAR TENNYSON,

I have been long hoping for a letter from you: it has come this morning,
and repays me for all waiting. While you and Morton write to me about
Italy I shall never go to see it. And yet your account of Cicero's
villa, I confess, gives me a twinge. But of this I am sure: if I saw all
these fine things with the bodily eye, I should but see them as a scene
in a play, with the additional annoyance of being bitten with fleas
perhaps, and being in a state of transition which is not suitable to me:
whereas while you see them, and will represent them to me, I see them
through your imagination, and that is better than any light of my own.
This is very true, I assure you: and you and Morton have given me quite a
different view of Italy to what I had before: a much more enchanting one,
but not the more likely to seduce me into making the false step of trying
to realize it for myself. . . . In the mean time how tired and bored
would you be to take one of my travels--a voyage of eight miles from
Bedford perhaps--travelled twenty times before--every winding of the
river, every church-spire, every country pot house and the quality of its
beer, well known. No surprise at all. Nil admirari--I find that old
Horace is a good fellow-traveller in England: so is Virgil. It is odd
that those fellows living in the land they did live in should have talked
so coldly about it. As to Alfred's book, I believe it has sold well: but
I have not seen him for a long while, and have had no means of hearing
about the matter except from Thompson, who told me that very many copies
had been sold at Cambridge, which indeed will be the chief market for
them. Neither have I seen any notice of them in print except that in the
Examiner; and that seemed so quiet that I scarce supposed it was by
Forster. Alfred himself is, I believe, in Kent at present. And now, my
dear Frederic, why do you think of returning to England? Depend upon it
you are better off as you are. You will never turn magistrate nor bean-
dibbler, nor make yourself of use in the country, and therefore why
should you not live where you like to live best? When I read of your
laughing and singing and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying
beakers full of the warm South I am sure you had best stay where you are.
I should indeed be very glad to see you again: but then I should miss
hearing from you: and you would only come here to abuse us all and go
back again. You Tennysons are born for warm climates. As to poor
England, I never see a paper, but I think with you that she is on the go.
I used to dread this: but somehow I now contemplate it as a necessary
thing, and, till the shoe begins to pinch me sorely, walk on with some
indifference. It seems impossible the manufacturers can go on as they
are: and impossible that the demand for our goods can continue as of old
in Europe: and impossible but that we must get a rub and licking in some
of our colonies: and if all these things come at once, why then the
devil's in it. I used to think as you do about France and the French:
and we all agreed in London that France should be divided among the other
powers as Poland was: but Donne has given me pause: he says that France
is the great counteracting democratic principle to Russia. This may be:
though I think Russia is too unwieldly and rotten-ripe ever to make a
huge progress in conquest. What is to be thought of a nation where the
upper classes speak the language of another country, and have varnished
over their honest barbarism with the poorest French profligacy and
intrigue? Russia does not seem a whole to me. In the mean time, all
goes on toward better and better, as is my firm belief: and humanity
grows clear by flowing, (very little profited by any single sage or
hero), and man shall have wings to fly and something much better than
that in the end. . . .

I draw a very little, and think of music as I walk in the fields: but
have no piano in this part of the world. . . . I hear there is a fine
new Symphony by Mendelssohn, who is by far our best writer now, and in
some measure combines Beethoven and Handel. I grow every day more and
more to love only the old God save the King style: the common chords,
those truisms of music, like other truisms so little understood in the
full. Just look at the mechanism of Robin Adair.

Now pray write to me again when you can. You don't know how much I
rejoice in your letters.

_To S. Laurence_.

BEDFORD, _Thursday_,
[_August_, 1842.]

DEAR LAURENCE,

. . . I have heard from Morton and F. Tennyson; the letter of the latter
very descriptive and fine. He is summering at Castellamare, and Morton
at Sorrento. What must Italy be if we are complaining of heat here!

I have just been naming all Mr. Browne's pictures for him. This he has
insisted on for three years, and at last this very hot day after an early
dinner pens and paper were brought out and I have been writing down awful
calumnies about Cuyp, Both, etc. Who could have painted Catharine of
Medicis, do you know? We are afraid to call it Vandyke, as he lived (I
believe) a century after her: and Mr. B. won't give up its being
Catharine's portrait. So here we are in a fix. I went to see Lord
Northampton's place Castle Ashby a week ago: expected pictures, and saw
very bad ones. The house is very handsome, built by Inigo Jones.

I weigh 14 stone--fact.

_To John Allen_.

[KEYSOE, _August_ 1842.]

MY DEAR JOHN ALLEN,

. . . I am much _entete_ at present about one Matthews, {122} a preacher
at Bedford, who would do very well for Manchester in opposition to
Chartists, etc. If you are here on a Friday or a Sunday go and hear him.
I would gladly subscribe to remove him from Bedford. All this you will
think absurd; and so perhaps it is.

I have been reading Stobaeus' Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a
pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose. The bits of
Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable. And this is really all
I have looked at all this summer.

BEDFORD, _August_ 29/42.

MY DEAREST FELLOW,

Your letter reached me this morning and gave me much pleasure. An old
acquaintance is not the worse for its wear, I think. This very time ten
years ago we were in Wales together: I at Mr. Rees' boarding-house at
Tenby: and there I made chance acquaintance with the whiskered man {123}
at whose house I am now staying:--then a boy of sixteen. He is now a man
of business, of town-politics, and more intent on the first of September
than on anything else in the world. I see very little of him. . . .

I occasionally read sentences about the Virtues out of this collection of
Stobaeus, and look into Sartor Resartus, which has fine things in it: and
a little Dante and a little Shakespeare. But the great secret of all is
the not eating meat. To that the world must come, I am sure. Only it
makes one grasshopper foolish. I also receive letters from Morton and F.
Tennyson full of fine accounts of Italy, finer than any I ever read. They
came all of a sudden on Cicero's villa--one of them at least, the
Formian--with a mosaic pavement leading thro' lemon gardens down to the
sea, and a little fountain as old as the Augustan age bubbling up as
fresh, Tennyson says, 'as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep
voice of the orator as he sate there in the stillness of the noon day,
devoting the siesta-hours to study.' When I first read of these things I
wish to see them; but, on reflection, I am sure I see them much better in
such letters as these.

I have seen one good picture about here: a portrait of O. Cromwell by
Lely--so said--unlike other Lelys, but very carefully painted: and, I
should think, an original portrait. . . I also read Hayley's Life of
Romney the other day. Romney wanted but education and reading to make
him a very fine painter: but his ideal was not high nor fixed. How
touching is the close of his life! He married at nineteen, and, because
Sir Joshua and others had said that marriage spoilt an artist, almost
immediately left his wife in the North, and scarce saw her till the end
of his life: when, old, nearly mad, and quite desolate, he went back to
her, and she received him, and nursed him till he died. This quiet act
of hers is worth all Romney's pictures; even as a matter of Art, I am
sure.

Whether this letter will ever reach you, I don't know. I am going in two
days to Naseby for a little while, and shall then find my way home to
Suffolk for the greater part of the Winter and Spring, I suppose.

O beate Sesti,
Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam.

I think of hiring a house in some country town like this, but nearer
Suffolk, and there have my books, etc. I want a house much: and a very
small one will content me, with a few old women close by to play cards
with at night. What a life, you will say!

His virtues walked then humble round,
Nor knew a pause, nor felt a void:
And sure the Eternal Master found
His single talent well employ'd.

That was not in playing picquet, I doubt. What fine lines of Johnson's
{125} these!

* * * * *

On the 15th of September 1842 FitzGerald first made Carlyle's personal
acquaintance. He always spoke of his having first gone to Chelsea in
company with Thackeray, and in the Notes which he left of his excavations
at Naseby he repeats what he frequently told myself and others. But his
memory was clearly at fault, for in a letter to Pollock, written on the
16th, but dated by mistake the 17th, of September, he says, 'I have come
up to London for two days on a false errand: and am therefore going back
in a pet, to Naseby. . . . I enquired at Spedding's rooms to-day: he is
expected by the 20th, which is near. Laurence is the only person I know
in town. . . . He and I went to see Carlyle at Chelsea yesterday. That
genius has been surveying the field of battle of Naseby in company with
Dr. Arnold, who died soon after, poor man! I doubt (from Carlyle's
description) if they identified the very ground of the carnage. . . . I
have heard nothing of Thackeray for these two months. He was to have
visited an Irish brother of mine: but he has not yet done so. I called
at Coram Street yesterday, and old John seemed to think he was yet in
Ireland.' With this correction I now give the Memorandum referred to,
which FitzGerald entrusted to my keeping together with several of
Carlyle's letters. An attempt to put up a monument on the real site of
the battle proved abortive, as will appear hereafter.

'About the middle of September 1842, W. M. Thackeray took me to tea
with Carlyle whom I had not previously known. He was then busy with
Cromwell; had just been, he told us, over the Field of Naseby in
company with Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and had sufficiently identified the
Ground of the Battle with the contemporaneous Accounts of it. As I
happened to know the Field well--the greater part of it then belonging
to my Family--I knew that Carlyle and Arnold had been mistaken--misled
in part by an Obelisk which my Father had set up as on the highest
Ground of the Field, but which they mistook for the centre-ground of
the Battle. This I told Carlyle, who was very reluctant to believe
that he and Arnold could have been deceived--that he could accept no
hearsay Tradition or Theory against the Evidence of his own Eyes, etc.
However, as I was just then going down to Naseby, I might enquire
further into the matter.

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