Chapter V: Part 5

But wait--before I finish I must ask why you assure Clark of Trinity
that it is the _rooks_ who call "Maud, Maud, etc." Indeed it is the
_Thrush_, as I have heard a hundred times in a summer's evening, when
scared in the evergreens of a garden. Therefore:

Rooks in a classroom quarrel up in the tall trees caw'd;
But 'twas the thrush in the laurel, that kept crying, Maud, Maud,
Maud.

Keats he put very high indeed. "I have been again reading Lord Houghton's _Life of Keats_" he wrote, "whose hastiest doggrel should show Browning, Morris & Co., that they are not what the newspapers tell them they are." "What a fuss the cockneys make about Shelley just now, surely not worth Keats' little finger," he wrote on another occasion. And again, "Is Mr. Rossetti a Great Poet like Browning and Morris? So the _Athenæum_ tells me. Dear me, how thick Great Poets _do_ grow nowadays." And yet again, "I can't read G. Eliot as I presume you can; I really conclude that the fault lies in me, not in her; so with Goethe (except in his letters, Table-Talk,[23] etc.), whom I try in vain to admire."

His real love was for Crabbe, the poet, not of "realism" but of reality.

Life's sternest painter and its best--

the poet of disillusionment. This love, which has been felt in different generations by Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Bishop Gore, he could get few of his friends to share with him. Tennyson himself was one of the few. "I keep reading Crabbe from time to time," he writes to Tennyson; "nobody else does unless it be another 'paltry Poet' whom I know. The edition only sells at a shilling a volume--second-hand. I don't wonder at young people and women (I mean no disparagement at all) not relishing even the good parts: and certainly there is plenty of bad for all readers."

What he loved before all was "touches of nature," the humour, the pathos, of ordinary life. He liked home-thrusts at human foibles and frailty, and again the outwelling of native nobility, generosity, or love. Newman's early Sermons, "Plain and Parochial" as they were, perhaps for this very reason he much affected. "The best that were ever written in my judgment," he said. He remained an admirer of Newman, and speaks enthusiastically of the _Apologia_ and its "sincerity." But he did not like the ritualism of the Oxford movement. His traditions were Evangelical,--one reason perhaps why he liked Newman. John Wesley was "one of his heroes," and he had much sympathy with, and was at one period personally drawn by, evangelical and revivalist Mission preaching.

He would have sympathized with Keble's lines teaching that his fellow-creatures should not

Strive to wind themselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.

This was probably one of the reasons why he did not like "In Memoriam." He said indeed that he thought it too artistic, too machine-made. He said that he thought Tennyson became gradually altogether too artistic and lost in spontaneity, vigour, and freshness. Yet he himself was a most laborious artist, both in his verse and in his prose. _Omar_ is most carefully elaborated, with correction on correction, and so are the best parts of _Euphranor_. His reasons were really deeper, and went more against the matter than the form. He did not like the early "Idylls of the King." "The Holy Grail" he liked as he had liked the "Vision of Sin." But what moved him to tears was the old-style "Northern Farmer," the "substantial, rough-spun Nature he knew," and "the old brute, invested by the poet with the solemn humour of Humanity like Shakespeare's _Shallow_." Yet even here a "crotchet" cropped up, as appears from the following note:

WOODBRIDGE, _May 20th, 1877_.

The enclosed scrap from Notes and Queries reminded me (as probably the
writer has been reminded) of your Old Farmer, the only part of which
that goes against me is the "canter and canter away" of the last line.
I can scarce tell you (as usual with me) why I don't like Doctor Fell;
but you know I must be right.

By the by, my old Crabbe in the Parish Register (Burials), says

Bless me! I die--and not a warning giv'n--
With much to do on earth, and _all_ for Heaven:
No preparation for my soul's affairs,
No leave petitioned for the Barn's repairs, etc.

not very good; and (N.B.) I don't mean it suggested anything in
Shakespeare's Northern Farmer--for that may pair off with Shallow.

Again, when it appeared in 1865, he was greatly taken with the "Captain." It was a return to the old personal mood and simple direct depiction of character:

MARKETHILL, WOODBRIDGE,
_October 22nd, 1865_.

DEAR MRS. TENNYSON--Talking of ships again, I liked much _The Captain_
in the People's Alfred. Was the last stanza (which I like also) an
afterthought?--I think a really _sublime_ thing is the end of
Kingsley's "Westward Ho!"--(which I never could read through)--The
Chase of the Ships: the Hero's being struck blind at the moment of
revenge: then his being taken to _see_ his rival and crew at the
bottom of the sea. Kingsley is a distressing writer to me: but I must
think this (the inspiration of it) of a piece with Homer and the
Gods--which you won't at all.

He liked, too, "Gareth and Lynette," which again he thought more natural and direct than some of the earlier Idylls. He liked, as might have been expected, the "Ballads and other Poems." But what is most significant, perhaps, among his likes and dislikes, is his love for "Audley Court," "one of my old favourites," he calls it. Why did FitzGerald like "Audley Court"? It is not one of the poems which are generally best known and most admired. Indeed, while it is in many ways beautiful and contains some splendid things, such as the sonorous line

The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores,

it is just one of those poems which the severe critic of Tennyson picks out for fault-finding and even for ridicule. It has what such critics call the over-elaborate, the "drawing-room" manner. Like Milton's picture of Eve's _déjeuner_, though with more humour and appropriateness, it employs the grand and sumptuous style to describe trifles, such as the venison pasty:

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied.

But on a closer consideration it will be seen that it has just what "Old Fitz" himself loved--the easy realism, the contentment with the things of this world; above all, that flavour of

After-dinner talk
Across the walnuts and the wine

which he also found and loved in that other favourite, "The Miller's Daughter," the harmless gossip about old friends

who was dead,
Who married, who was like to be, and how
The races went, and who would rent the hall.

This suited "Old Fitz's" temper absolutely. The humorous _pococurantism_, for cynicism it hardly is, of the quatrains put into the mouth of the Poet's friend, each ending "but let me live my life," breathes the very spirit of his own indolent, kindly Epicureanism, and indeed the poem might almost be taken as a record of a dialogue between the two friends in their early days.

He loved, too, the "Lord of Burleigh," "The Vision of Sin," and "The Lady of Shalott." The delicious idealism of these youthful pieces did not displease him. They had for him a "champagne flavour." They were part of his own youth. For a brief hour of that fast-fleeting day, the wine of life had sparkled in his own glass, but then too soon turned flat and flavourless.

For two or three things every lover of Tennyson must thank FitzGerald. He it was who, about 1838, soon after their friendship began, got his friend, Samuel Laurence, to paint the earliest portrait of the Poet, "the only one of the old days and still the best of all to my thinking," as he wrote in 1871. He, too, preserved and gave to Tennyson the drawing by Thackeray of the "Lord of Burleigh." When the Poet was rather dilatory in calling at Spedding's house to claim this portrait, FitzGerald wrote: "Tell him I don't think Browning would have served me so, and I mean to prefer his poems for the future." He also rescued from the flames some of the pages of the famous "Butcher's Book," the tall, ledger-like MS. volume, in which many of the early poems he so much loved were written, and gave them to the Library of Trinity College. About this he wrote:

MARKETHILL, WOODBRIDGE,
_December 4th, 1864_.

DEAR ALFRED--Now I should be almost ready to be "yours ever, etc." if
I didn't remember to ask you if you have any objection to my giving
two or three of the leaves of your old "Butcher's Book" (do you
remember?) to the Library at Trinity College? An admirer of your's
there told me they would be glad of some such thing--It was in 1842,
when you were printing the two good old volumes:--in Spedding's
rooms--and the "Butcher's Book," after its margins serving for
pipe-lights, went leaf by leaf into the fire: and I told you I would
keep two or three leaves of it as a remembrance. So I took a bit of my
old favourite "Audley Court": and a bit of another, I forget which:
for I can't lay my hands on them just now. But when I do, I shall give
them to Trinity College unless you are strongly opposed. I dare say,
however, you would give them the whole MS. of one of your later
poems: which probably they would value more.

Tennyson appreciated "Old Fitz's" fine qualities as a critic, but he recognized their limitations, and in particular his "crotchets" and prejudices. He was himself, as is now generally recognized, a consummate critic, and withal a most kindly and catholic one. In my first conversation with him he said that he used to think Goethe a good critic. "He always discovered all the good he could in a man." To his own contemporaries, especially towards Browning, for example, his attitude was very different, as FitzGerald acknowledged, from FitzGerald's own. I did not like, I remember, to ask him what he thought of Browning, but his son encouraged me to do so. "You ask him," he said. "He'll tell you at once." At last I did so. "A true genius, but wanting in art," he said. And on another occasion he spoke rather more in detail to the same purpose.

A special friend of both Tennyson and FitzGerald was Thackeray. With him FitzGerald had been intimate even earlier than with Tennyson. They were friends at college, and had gone as young men together to Paris, Thackeray ostensibly to study art. FitzGerald knew Paris of old. His father had a home there when he was a child, and went there for a few months every year for some years.

When he was nearing seventy FitzGerald wrote the following delightful account of some of his recollections to Thackeray's daughter:

WOODBRIDGE, _May 18th, 1875_.

DEAR ANNIE THACKERAY--I suppose you love Paris as your Father did--as
I used to do till it was made so other than it was, in the days of
Louis XVIII. when I first lived in it. _Then_ it was all irregular and
picturesque; with shops, hotels, _cafés_, theatres, etc. intermixed
all along the Boulevards, all of different sorts and sizes.

Think of my remembering the _then_ Royal Family going in several
carriages to hunt in the Forest of St. Germain's--Louis XVIII. first,
with his _Gardes du Corps_, in blue and silver: then Monsieur
(afterwards Charles X.) with _his_ Guard in green and gold--French
horns blowing--"tra, tra, tra" (as Madame de Sévigné says), through
the lines of chestnut and limes--in flower. And then _Madame_ (of
Angoulême) standing up in her carriage, blear-eyed, dressed in white
with her waist at her neck--standing up in the carriage at a corner of
the wood to curtsey to the English assembled there--my mother among
them. This was in 1817. Now _you_ would have made a delightful
description of all this; you will say _I_ have done so, but that is
not so. And yet I saw, and see, it all.

Whenever you write again--(I don't wish you to write now) tell me what
you think of Irving and Salvini; of the former of whom I have very
different reports, Macready's Memoirs seem to me very _conscientious_
and _rather dull_; _toujours Megready_ (as one W. M. T. irreverently
called him). He seems to me to have had no humour--which I also
observed in his acting. He would have made a better scholar or divine,
I think: a very honourable, good man anywhere and anyhow.

With Thackeray himself he always maintained the same cordial relations as he did with Tennyson. But his literary attitude shifted and varied in the same way. Here, again, he preferred the early work which he had seen in process of creation. In later years, when they met him at Woodbridge, he said to "Alfred" and his son, "I hardly dare take down Thackeray's early books, because they are so great. It's like waking the Thunder." He wrote of Thackeray in 1849: "He is just the same. All the world 'admires _Vanity Fair_,' and the author is courted by Dukes and Duchesses and wits of both sexes. I like _Pendennis much_, and Alfred said he thought it was quite delicious: it seemed to him so _mature_ he said." But a little later he took alarm at the Dukes and Duchesses, and wrote to Frederick Tennyson: "I am come to London, but I do not go to Operas or Plays, and have scarce time (and it must be said, scarce inclination) to hunt up many friends--I get shyer and shyer even of those I knew. Thackeray is in such a great world that I am afraid of him; he gets tired of me and we are content to regard each other at a distance. You, Alfred, Spedding, and Allen, are the only men I ever care to see again.... As you know, I admire your poems, the only poems by a living writer I do admire, except Alfred's."

He told Hallam Tennyson that he greatly admired the charming scene in "Philip" where the young lady unexpectedly discovered her lover (Philip) on the box of the diligence, and quieted the screaming children inside by saying, "Hush! _he's_ there."

In particular, he was very severe on anything he called "cockney," speaking, that is, the language of the town, not of the country; in other words, dealing with nature and human nature at second-hand. To this his letters again and again return. Of "fine writing," as he called it, even when it occurred in his own early work, he was unsparingly critical. Thus of _Euphranor_ he wrote to Mrs. Kemble: "The Dialogue is a pretty thing in some respects but disfigured by some confounded _smart_ writing in parts." He thought this fault in particular, so he says in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, "the loose screw in American literature," and deplored its presence in Lowell, a writer whom otherwise he liked. "I honestly admire his work in the main," he says, "and I think he is altogether the best critic we have, something of what Ste. Beuve is in French." He thought that Tennyson came to suffer from these defects in his later days, and that the artist overpowered the man.

The latest of Tennyson's poems, of course, he did not live to see. He did not see, for instance, "Crossing the Bar." What would he have thought of it? Another old friend of Tennyson, also a fastidious critic, the Duke of Argyll, in an unpublished letter of February 1, 1892, writing of this and of the lines on the "Death of the Duke of Clarence," says: "Magnificent, is all I can say of your lines in the _Nineteenth_. The two last things of yours that I have seen, this and the 'Bar,' are both perfect in their several ways, and such as no other man could have written. The 'Bar' is the type of what I define Poetry to be, great thought in true imagery and unusual expression. All the three are needed for the type thing. Much fine poetry is to me only eloquence, which is quite another thing." With the last sentence FitzGerald would certainly have agreed, for it is what in other words he was himself constantly saying. But he seemed to require something more than great thoughts and true images and choice diction. Poignant and revealing touches, what he called in Crabbe "shrewd hits"; feeling, as well as, if not more than, thought--this was what he asked for. All Browning's genius seemed to him _emphase_, cleverness, curiosity, "cockneyism."

"The Dramatic Idylls," he writes to Frederick Tennyson, "seemed to me 'Ingoldsby.' It seems to me as if the Beautiful being already appropriated by former men of genius, those who are not inspired, can only try for a Place among them by recourse to the Quaint, Grotesque, and Ugly in all the Arts,--what I call the Gargoyle style." And again: "I always said he must be a cockney, and now I find he is Camberwell-born--

It once was the Pastoral cockney,
It now is the cockney Profound."

The establishment of the Browning Society tried him specially. "Imagine a man abetting all this," he writes. Tennyson had, through life, a high opinion of FitzGerald's powers of criticism. They had often in their youth discussed the classics of all time and all times together, and also, with the poetic freedom of young men, their seniors, Shelley, and Byron, and Wordsworth. It was FitzGerald who invented for the last the name by which he went in their circle, of the "Daddy." They had fought for the ownership of the Wordsworthian line, the "weakest blank verse in the language":

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.

It really was FitzGerald's description, given in conversation, of the gentleman who was going to marry his sister. When he died in 1862 FitzGerald, writing to Tennyson, reminded him of the line.

"This letter," he writes, "ought to be on a black-edged paper in a
black-edged cover: for I have just lost a brother-in-law--one of the
best of Men. If you ask, 'Who?' I reply, in what you once called the
weakest line ever enunciated:

A Mister Wilkinson, a Clergyman.

You can't remember this: in Old Charlotte Street, ages ago!"

In the valedictory verses Tennyson makes allusion to this critical habit:

And when I fancied that my friend
For this brief idyll would require
A less diffuse and opulent end,
And would defend his judgment well,
If I should deem it over nice,----

He himself was more catholic and generous. It was his generosity as well as their admiration for him which gave him the place he held among his brother poets and especially after he himself had won recognition among the younger men.

His relation to Browning, Patmore, and P. J. Bailey, to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, to Watson and Kipling as to Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, are well known. There is one writer who ought to be added to the list, who received some of his earliest encouragement from Tennyson--George Meredith. A letter, hitherto unpublished, written in January 1851, may illustrate this. He had just, in some trepidation, sent Tennyson his first volume of poems, containing the now well-known "Love in the Valley." As Meredith told me himself, Tennyson replied with an exceedingly kind and "pretty" letter, saying that there was one poem in the book he could have wished he had written, and inviting Meredith to come to see him. The following is Meredith's answer:

SIR--When I tell you that it would have been my chief ambition in
publishing the little volume of poems you have received, to obtain
your praise, you may imagine what pride and pleasure your letter gave
me; though, indeed, I do not deserve so much as your generous
appreciation would bestow, and of this I am very conscious. I had but
counted twenty-three years when the book was published, which may
account for, and excuse perhaps many of the immaturities. When you say
you would like to know me, I can scarcely trust myself to express with
how much delight I would wait upon you--a privilege I have long
desired. As I suppose the number of poetic visits you receive are
fully as troublesome as the books, I will not venture to call on you
until you are able to make an appointment. My residence and address is
Weybridge, but I shall not return to Town from Southend before Friday
week. If in the meantime you will fix any day following that date, I
shall gladly avail myself of the honour of your invitation. My address
here is care of Mrs. Peacock, Southend, Essex. I have the honour to
be, most faithfully yours,

GEORGE MEREDITH.

Alfred Tennyson, Esq.

The complement to "Old Fitz" was Carlyle. He was the friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. Gruff, grumbling, self-centred, satirical, at times even rude and rough, as he was, both of them seemed to have got not so much on his blind, as on his kind side from the first, and always to have remained there. Carlyle's descriptions of Tennyson as a young man in the early "forties" and of the pleasure he had in his company are well known. "He seemed to take a fancy to me," Tennyson said himself one day while we talked about him at Farringford. They foregathered a good deal at this period, sat and smoked silently, walked and talked together, both by day and night. FitzGerald told Hallam Tennyson, years after, during the visit to Woodbridge, that Carlyle was much concerned at this period about his father's poverty, and said to him, "Alfred must have a pension." The story of the way in which he spurred on "Dicky" Milnes to secure the pension is now classical. What his special effect, if he had any, on Tennyson was, it might be difficult to estimate or analyse.

The younger generation to-day does not remember the period of Carlyle's immense influence. It lasted just into the youth of my contemporaries and myself, or perhaps a little longer, and then began to wane and die away. He certainly was a "radio-active" force in the days and with the men of Tennyson's youth,--Maurice, and Sterling, and "Dicky" Milnes, as he was a little later with Ruskin and Kingsley. FitzGerald, with his detachment and his fearless sincerity, estimated him as fairly as any one. "Do you see Carlyle's _Latter-Day Pamphlets_?" he wrote. "They make the world laugh, and his friends rather sorry for him. But that is because people will still look for practical measures from him. One must be content with him as a great satirist who can make us feel when we are wrong, though he cannot set us right. There is a bottom of truth in Carlyle's wildest rhapsodies."

He wrote to Frederick Tennyson in 1850: "When I spoke of the 'Latter-Day Prophet' I conclude you have read or heard of Carlyle's Pamphlets. People are tired of them and of him; he only foams, snaps, and howls and no progress people say. This is about true, and yet there is vital good in all he has written." Again, in 1854, he says, "Carlyle I did not go to see, for I have really nothing to tell him, and I am tired of hearing him growl, tho' I admire him as much as ever." "I wonder if he ever thinks how much sound and fury he has vented," he writes on another occasion.

But the posthumous publication of Carlyle's Letters, as he wrote about a fortnight before his own death, "raised him in FitzGerald's esteem"; and his last effort was to go to Chelsea to see his statue, and the old house hard by which he had not seen for five-and-twenty years, to find it, alas, "deserted, neglected, and 'To let!'"

Carlyle was indeed much what "Old Fitz" describes. He was a powerful solvent of his age. He destroyed many shams, "Hebrew rags," "old clothes," as he called them. Both by his own example and his fiery energy he inculcated the "Gospel of Work." He was not a modern realist, but a man who dealt in realities, who perceived that virtue and beauty and faith are as real as vice and ugliness and unfaith, nay, perhaps more real; but that certainly neither are shams, neither God nor the Devil, though of shams, of false gods and false devils, there are many. His appreciation of poetry was, as is well known, but scant and intermittent. He used to banter Tennyson and call him "a Life-Guardsman spoiled by making poetry," but he became converted even to his poems, though, as he said, this was surprising to himself. He "felt the pulse of a real man's heart" in the 1842 volumes. "Ulysses" was a special favourite. He quoted again and again the lines:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.

"These lines do not make me weep," he said, "but there is in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read." He, fortunately, also "took a fancy" to Mrs. Tennyson when he met her as a bride at Tent Lodge, Coniston, partly because, in answer to one of his wild grumbles, she said, "That is not sane, Mr. Carlyle." An unpublished letter from Carlyle of the date October 1850, describes an admirer of Tennyson's poems, an ill-starred but brave man, a skilful physician, a friend of Dr. John Carlyle at Leamington, who, after losing the greater part of his face by _caries_ of the bone, had at last been cured, though awfully disfigured. "He fled to Keswick," writes Carlyle, "and there he now resides, not idle still, nor forsaken of friends, or hope, or domestic joy--a monument of human courtesy, and really a worthy and rather interesting man. Such is your admirer and mine. Heaven be good to him and us."

FitzGerald, in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, quotes with approval a criticism of Lowell's that Carlyle "was a poet in all but rhythm"; and it would not be difficult to find "parallel passages" between Tennyson and Carlyle, between _Sartor Resartus_ and "In Memoriam." The _Life of Sterling_, too, should be read by any student anxious to "reconstitute the atmosphere" in which that poem grew up, and which, to a certain extent, it still breathes. But "parallel passages" are misleading. Suffice it to say that both went through the storm and stress of a doubting age, both took their stand on the solid rock of God and of real, healthy human nature,--both emerged in the "Eternal Yea."

Froude, in his history of Carlyle's Life in London, has a most interesting autobiographic passage about Carlyle's position and influence in 1843, the time of the publication of _Past and Present_, which brings this out with special force. He says:

In this condition the best and bravest of my own contemporaries
determined to have done with insincerity, to find ground under their
feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and
what we could honestly regard as true and believe that and live by it.
Tennyson became the voice of this feeling in poetry, Carlyle in what
was called prose, though prose it was not, but something by itself
with a form and melody of its own.

Tennyson's Poems, the group of Poems which closed with "In Memoriam,"
became to many of us what the "Christian Year" was to orthodox
Churchmen. We read them, and they became part of our minds, the
expression in exquisite language of the feelings which were working in
ourselves. Carlyle stood beside him as a prophet and teacher; and to
the young, the generous, to every one who took life seriously, who
wished to make an honourable use of it and could not be content with
sitting down and making money, his words were like the morning
_reveille_.

Others may come at last to the sad conclusion that nothing can be
known about the world, that the external powers, whatever they may be,
are indifferent to human action or human welfare. To such an opinion
some men, and those not the worst, may be driven after weary
observation of life. But the young will never believe it; or if they
do they have been young only in name.

If the first paragraphs aptly "place" Tennyson and Carlyle, the last, though not intentionally, exactly suits their friend, the translator of the _Rubáiyát_. FitzGerald remained, as his friend the Master of Trinity College (W. H. Thompson) said, in "Doubting Castle." Tennyson was the most hopeful, as well as the most balanced and sane, and therefore the most helpful of the three.

Toward the end of his life, Carlyle, in the Inaugural Address given by him as Rector of Edinburgh University, in which he summed up so many of the convictions of a lifetime, put forward the following description of the completely healthy human spirit. "A man all lucid and in equilibrium. His intellect a clear mirror, geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to all objects and impressions made on it, and imaging all things in their correct proportions, not twisted up into convex or concave and distorting everything so that he cannot see the truth of the matter without endless groping and manipulation--healthy, clear and free, and discerning all round about him." He put this picture before young men as the ideal to be aimed at by the intellectual student, and in particular by the man of letters. "But," he said, "we can never never attain that at all." Perhaps not altogether. Perhaps even he who invented the phrase for the poet's duty of "holding the mirror up to Nature," did not wholly attain to it. But, according to his measure, it is no bad description of Alfred Tennyson, with the "universality of his mind," the simplicity of his good sense, the childlike sincerity of his spirit. This quality it was that both Carlyle and FitzGerald found and liked in him.

It has been said that Tennyson and FitzGerald read the same books. One of the best instances of this is to be found in a long letter of FitzGerald's about posthumous fame and literary immortality. It was written to Cowell in 1847, and is given by Dr. Aldis Wright in his first collection. After speaking of Homer and the _Iliad_, FitzGerald writes:

Yet as I often think it is not the poetical imagination, but bare
Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the
Iliad; the history of the world, the great infinitudes of Space and
Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes
me. And when we think that Man must go on in the same plodding way,
one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or
turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of
discovery will distance all his imaginations and dissolve the language
in which they are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now after two
thousand years: a space that seems long to us whose lives are so
brief; but a moment, the twinkling of an eye, if compared (not to
Eternity alone), but to the ages which it is now known the world must
have existed, and (unless for some external violence) must continue to
exist.

Lyell in his book about America, says that the Falls of Niagara, if
(as seems certain) they have worked their way back southwards for
seven miles, must have taken over 35,000 years to do so at the rate of
something over a foot a year! Sometimes they fall back on a stratum
that crumbles away from behind them more easily: but then again they
have to roll over rock that yields to them scarce more perceptibly
than the anvil to the serpent. And these very soft strata, which the
Cataract now erodes, contain evidences of a race of animals, and of
the action of seas washing over them, long before Niagara came to have
a distinct current; and the rocks were compounded ages and ages before
those strata! So that, as Lyell says, the geologist, looking at
Niagara forgets even the roar of its waters in the contemplation of
the awful processes of time that it suggests. It is not only that the
vision of Time must wither the Poet's hope of immortality, but it is
in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.

This train of thought was evidently often present to FitzGerald's mind. It oppressed him. It makes itself felt in the _Rubáiyát_. It was one of the many great ideas he imported into, or educed from, the old Persian Astronomer.

And fear not lest existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has poured
Millions of Bubbles like us and will pour

When you and I behind the Veil are past:
Oh but the long long while the world shall last,
Which of our coming and departure heeds
As the Sev'n Seas should heed a pebble-cast.

It was even more constantly present to the mind of Tennyson. Astronomy and Geology had been among his favourite studies from his early youth, and remained so all his life. When I was walking with him toward the Needles and looking at the magnificent chalk cliff below the downs, and spoke about his felicitous epithet for it--"the milky steep," he said, "The most wonderful thing about that cliff is to think it was all once alive." The allusions to it in his poems are innumerable:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

He was always "hearing the roll of the ages." He, too, had read his Lyell, and the contemplation of geological time suggested to him exactly the same reflections which FitzGerald draws out. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that he himself may have imparted them to FitzGerald. For he has embodied just these thoughts in that noble late poem "Parnassus," with a resemblance which is startling. But while the parallel between "Parnassus" and FitzGerald's letter is extraordinarily close up to a certain point, the contrast, when it is reached, is even more striking, and is the fundamental contrast between the two men and their creeds:

What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain,
Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain?
On those two known peaks they stand, ever spreading and heightening;
Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning!
Look, in their deep double shadow the crown'd ones all disappearing!
Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing!
Sounding for ever and ever? pass on! the sight confuses--
These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!

So far Tennyson agrees with _Omar_:

Ah make the most of what we yet may spend
Before we too into the dust descend;
Dust into dust and under dust to lie,
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and sans end!

But then comes the divergence, conveyed with the exquisitely sympathetic change of rhythm:

If the lips were touch'd with fire from off a pure Pierian altar,
Tho' their music here be mortal, need the singer greatly care?
Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter;
Let the golden Iliad vanish, Homer here is Homer there.

The beautiful lines which form the Envoy to "Tiresias," already alluded to, never reached their address. I remember well, when we spoke of FitzGerald, the sadness with which Tennyson said to me, "He never saw them. He died before they were sent him." After his death Tennyson added the Epilogue on the same note. It is touching to see that in his closing lines to his old friend he had hinted with tender delicacy at the same creed to which he always clung:

Gone into darkness, that full light
Of friendship! past, in sleep, away
By night, into the deeper night!
The deeper night? A clearer day
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth--
If night, what barren toil to be!
What life, so maim'd by night, were worth
Our living out? Not mine to me
Remembering all the golden hours
Now silent, and so many dead
And him the last; and laying flowers,
This wreath, above his honour'd head,
And praying that, when I from hence
Shall fade with him into the unknown,
My close of earth's experience
May prove as peaceful as his own.

Like many rough and overbearing men Carlyle liked those who stood up to him and gave him back, in his own phrase, "shake for shake." FitzGerald was one of these. He made his better acquaintance by contradicting and correcting him about the battlefield and the buried warriors of Naseby Fight. Carlyle took it all in excellent part, and they became close friends. Carlyle went to visit him and invited the many letters which FitzGerald wrote. In his later years he sent one of these letters to C. E. Norton as a "slight emblem and memorial of the peaceable, affectionate, ultra-modest man and his innocent _far niente_ life"; "and," he adds, "the connection (were there nothing more) of Omar, the Mahometan Blackguard, and Oliver Cromwell, the English Puritan."

But "Old Fitz" could criticize and sum up Carlyle equally effectively. He most happily pointed out his inconsistency in praising the "Hebrew rags" of the old Evangelical beliefs when seen in Cromwell and his generals, and not being willing to let them still serve for humble folk in his own day. His tone here is singularly like that of Tennyson's well-known lines, beginning:

Leave thou thy sister when she prays.

"We may be well content," FitzGerald writes, "even to suffer some absurdities in the Form if the Spirit does well on the whole." He would probably have agreed with much of Tennyson's "Akbar's Dream," which he did not live to read. For the tenets of "Omar," "The Mahometan Blackguard," must not be taken as representing the whole of FitzGerald's philosophy, any more than his eccentricities and negligent habits must be taken as a complete expression of his life.

Too exclusive attention has been paid to both. Dr. Aldis Wright, one of the few surviving friends who knew him really well, speaks justly of "the exaggerated stories of his slovenliness and his idleness," and "of the way in which he has been made responsible for all the oddities of his family." "Every tale," he says, "that may be true of some of his kin, is fathered upon him."

And FitzGerald's own Preface to his translation of _Omar_ shows what his real moral and religious attitude toward the _Rubáiyát_ was. He felt bound, so far as the spirit, if not the letter, went, to present it faithfully, if not literally; but he speaks very gravely of it. "The quatrains here selected," he writes in the Preface, "are strung into something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the 'Drink and make merry' which (genuine or not), recurs over frequently in the original. Either way, the result is sad enough, saddest perhaps when most ostentatiously merry, more apt to move sorrow than Anger toward the old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavouring to unshackle his steps from Destiny and to catch some authentic Glimpse of TO-MORROW, fell back upon TO-DAY (which has outlived so many To-morrows!) as the only ground he got to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet."

The truth is, Old Fitz's foibles, and indeed his faults, were only too patent to others and to himself. But if _noscitur a sociis_ holds good, Carlyle and Tennyson and Thackeray, Spedding, Thompson, the Cowells, and Mrs. Kemble, the friends of his whole lifetime, Lowell and C. E. Norton, those of his later years, may be permitted to outweigh his at times too tolerant cultivation and indulgence of his burly Vikings. Tennyson's relation to him was summed up in his letter to Sir Frederick Pollock which Dr. Aldis Wright quotes, but which may fitly here be quoted again: "I had no truer friend; he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit."

These words, with Tennyson's poetic picture already quoted, with Carlyle's epithets, "innocent, _far niente_, ultra-modest," with his own writings taken as a whole and not _Omar_ alone, especially his Letters, may be left to speak for him in life and in death,--these and the epitaph which he asked to have placed upon his gravestone:

"It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves."

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON'S TALK FROM 1835 TO 1853

[Many more were in a Notebook, which I have now lost.--E. F. G.]

By EDWARD FITZGERALD

(Given to Hallam Lord Tennyson[24])

1835

(Resting on our oars one calm day on Windermere, whither we had gone for a week from dear Spedding's Mirehouse at the end of May 1835,--resting on our oars, and looking into the lake quite unruffled and clear, he quoted from the lines he had lately read us from the MS. of "Morte d'Arthur" about the lonely lady of the Lake and Excalibur.)

Nine days she wrought it, sitting all alone
Upon the hidden bases of the Hills.

"Not bad that, Fitz, is it?"

(One summer day looking from Richmond Star and Garter.)

"I love those woods that go triumphing down to the river."

"Somehow water is the element which I love best of all the four." (He was passionately fond of the sea and of babbling brooks.--ED.)

"Some one says that nothing strikes one more on returning from the Continent than the look of our English country towns. Houses not so big, nor such rows of them as abroad; but each house, little or big, distinct from one another, each man's castle, built according to his own means and fancy, and so indicating the Englishman's individual humour.

"I have been two days abroad--no further than Boulogne this time, but I am struck as always on returning from France with the look of good sense in the London people."

(Standing before a Madonna, by Murillo, at the Dulwich Gallery--her eyes fixed on you.)

"Yes--but they seem to look at something beyond--beyond the Actual into Abstraction. I have seen that in a human face." (I, E. F. G., have seen it in _his_. Some American spoke of the same in Wordsworth. I suppose it may be so with all _Poets_.)

1850

"When I was sitting by the banks of Doon--I don't know why--I wasn't in the least spoony--not thinking of Burns (but of the lapsing of the Ages)--when all of a sudden I gave way to a passion of tears."

"I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two bumpkins who stood by said there was no one in the two parishes who could do it. I was then about twenty-five." (He could carry his mother's pony round the dinner-table.--E. F. G.)

"The Sea at Mablethorpe is the grandest I know, except perhaps at Land's End." (That is as he afterwards explained to me in a letter.)

"Thackeray is the better artist, Dickens the [more affluent] Genius. He, like Hogarth, has the moral sublime sometimes: but not the ideal sublime. Perhaps I seem talking nonsense; I mean Hogarth could not conceive an Apollo or a Jupiter." (Or Sigismunda.--E. F. G.)--"I think Hogarth greater than Dickens."

(Looking at an engraving of the Sistine Madonna in which only She and the Child, I think, were represented.)

"Perhaps finer than the whole composition in so far as one's eyes are more concentrated on the subject. The Child seems to me the furthest result of human art. His attitude is that of a man--his countenance a Jupiter's--perhaps rather too much so."

(He afterwards said (1852) that his own little boy, Hallam, explained the expression of Raffaelle's. He said he thought he had known Raffaelle before he went to Italy--but not Michael Angelo--not only Statues and Frescoes, but some picture (I think) of a Madonna "dragging a ton of a Child over her Shoulder.")

Seaford: December 27th-28th, 1852

"Babies delight in being moved to and from anything: that is amusement to them. What a Life of Wonder--every object new. This morning he (his own little boy) worshipp'd the Bed-post when a gleam of sunshine lighted on it."

"I am afraid of him. It is a Man. Babes have an expression of grandeur that children lose. I used to think that the old Painters overdid the Expression and Dignity of their infant Christs: but I see they did not."

"I was struck at the Duke's (Wellington's) Funeral with the look of sober Manhood and Humanity in the British Soldiers."

(Of Laurence's chalk drawing of ----'s head--"rather diplomatic than inhuman"--he said in fun.--E. F. G.)

Brighton, 1852-1853

"The finest Sea I have seen is at Valentia (Ireland), without any wind and seemingly without a Wave, but with the momentum of the Atlantic behind it, it dashes up into foam--blue diamond it looked like--all along the rocks--like ghosts playing at Hide and Seek."

(At some other time on the same subject.)

"When I was in Cornwall it had blown a storm of wind and rain for days--all of a sudden fell into perfect calm; I was a little inland of the cliffs, when, after a space of perfect silence, a long roll of Thunder--from some wave rushing into a cavern, I suppose--came up from the Distance and died away. I never _felt_ Silence like that."

"_This_" (looking from Brighton Pier) "is not a grand sea: only an angry curt sea. It seems to _shriek_ as it recoils with its pebbles along the beach."

"The Earth has light of her own--so has Venus--perhaps all the other Planets--electrical light, or what we call Aurora. The light edge of the dark hemisphere of the moon--the 'old Moon in the new Moon's arms.'"

"Nay, they say she has no atmosphere at all."

(I do not remember when this was said, nor whether I have exactly set it down; therefore must not make A. T. answerable for what he did not say, or for what after-discovery may have caused him to unsay. He had a powerful brain for Physics as for the Ideal. I remember his noticing that the forward-bending horns of some built-up mammal in the British Museum would never force its way through jungle, etc., and I observed on an after-visit that they had been altered accordingly.)

"Sometimes I think Shakespeare's Sonnets finer than his Plays--which is of course absurd. For it is the knowledge of the Plays that makes the Sonnets so fine."

"Do you think the Artist ever feels satisfied with his Song? Not with the Whole, I think; but perhaps the expression of parts."

(Standing one day with him looking at two busts--one of Dante, the other of Goethe, in a London shop, I asked, "What is wanting to make Goethe's as fine as the other's?")

"The Divine." ("Edel sei der Mensch" was a poem in which he thought he found "The Divine."--ED.)

(Taking up and reading some number of _Pendennis_ at my lodging.) "It's delicious--it's so mature."

(Of Richardson's _Clarissa_, etc.) "I love those great, still Books."

"What is it in Dryden? I always feel that he is greater than his works." (Though he thought much of "Theodore and Honoria," and quoted emphatically:

More than a mile _immerst_ within the wood.)

"Two of the finest similes in poetry are Milton's--that of the Fleet hanging in the air (_Paradise Lost_), and the gunpowder-like 'So started up in his foul shape the Fiend.' (Which latter A. T. used to enact with grim humour, from the crouching of the Toad to the Explosion.) Say what you please, I feel certain that Milton after Death shot up into some grim Archangel." _N.B._--He used in earlier days to do the sun coming out from a cloud, and returning into one again, with a gradual opening and shutting of eyes and lips, etc. And, with a great fluffing up of his hair into full wig, and elevation of cravat and collar, George the Fourth in as comical and wonderful a way.

"I could not read through _Palmerin of England_, nor _Amadis of Gaul_, or any of those old romances--not even 'Morte d'Arthur,' though with so many fine things in it--But all strung together without Art."

Old Hallam had been speaking of Shakespeare as the greatest of men, etc. A. T. "Well, he was the Man one would have wished to introduce to another Planet as a sample of our kind."

_Àpropos_ of physical stature, A. T. had been noticing how small Guizot looked beside old Hallam (when he went with Guizot, Hallam, and Macaulay over the Houses of Parliament.--ED.).

"I was skating one day at full swing and came clash against a man of my own stature who was going at the same. We both fell asunder--got up--and _laughed_. Had we been short men we might have resented."

(I blamed some one for swearing at the servant girl in a lodging.) "I don't know if women don't like it from men: they think it shows Vigour." (Not that he ever did so himself.)

"There is a want of central dignity about him--he excuses himself, etc."

"Most great men write terse hands."

"I like those old Variorum Classics--all the Notes make the Text look precious."

(Of some dogmatic summary.) "That is the quick decision of a mind that sees half the truth."

TENNYSON AND THACKERAY

By LADY RITCHIE

... You ask me what I can remember of your Father and of mine in early days. I seem to _know_ more than I actually remember....

In looking over old letters and papers, I have found very few mentions of the many actual meetings between them, though again and again the Poet's name is quoted and recorded, nor can I recall the time when I did not hear it spoken of with trust and admiring regard. To this day we possess "The Day Dream," copied out from beginning to end in my Father's writing.

He was about twenty years of age when one day, in May 1832, he wrote down in his diary:

Kemble and Hallam sat here for an hour. Read an article in _Blackwood_
about A. Tennyson, abusing Hallam for his essay in _The Englishman_.

Then again ...

Kemble read me some very beautiful verses of Tennyson's.

And again:

Found that B. and I did not at all agree about Tennyson. B. is a
clever fellow nevertheless, and makes money by magazine writing, in
which I should much desire to follow his example.

After my Father's marriage, when he was living in Coram Street, Tennyson and FitzGerald both came to see him there. In an old letter of my mother's she describes Mr. Tennyson coming and my sitting at the table beside her in a tall chair and with a new pinafore for the occasion. FitzGerald, I think, also spoke of one of these meetings, and of my Father exclaiming suddenly, "My dear Alfred, you do talk d---- well."

As we grew up, the Tennyson books were a part of our household life. I can especially remember one volume, which came out when I was a little girl and which my Father lent to a friend, and I also remember his laughing vexation and annoyance when she returned the book all scored and defaced with absurd notes and marks of exclamation everywhere.

I once published an article in an American magazine from which I venture to quote a passage which tells of one of the early meetings:

I can remember vaguely, on one occasion through a cloud of smoke,
looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave head of the Poet
Laureate. He was sitting with my Father in the twilight after some
family meal in the old house in Kensington; it was Tennyson himself
who afterwards reminded me how upon this occasion, while my Father was
speaking, my little sister looked up suddenly from the book over which
she had been absorbed, saying, in her sweet childish voice, "Papa, why
do you not write books like _Nicholas Nickleby_?" Then again, I seem
to hear across that same familiar table, voices, without shape or
name, talking and telling each other that Mr. Tennyson was married,
that he and his wife had been met walking on the terrace at Clevedon
Court, and then the clouds descend again, except, indeed, that I can
still see my Father riding off on his brown cob to Mr. and Mrs.
Tennyson's house at Twickenham to attend the christening of Hallam
their eldest son.

* * * * *

Being _themselves_, when men, such as these two men, appreciate each other's work, they know, with their great instinct for truth and directness, what to admire--smaller people are apt to admire the men rather than the work. When Tennyson and my Father met, it was as when knights meet in the field.

How my Father appreciated the _Idylls_ will be seen from the following letter, which came as an answer to his own:[25]

FARRINGFORD, I.W.