Letters of Edward FitzGerald Volume I Part 5

I was made glad and sad last night in looking over some of your letters to me, ever since my stay at Tenby. I wonder within myself if we are changed since then. Do you remember that day when we sat upon that rock that runs out into the sea, and looked down into the clear water below? I must go to Tenby one of these days, and walk that old walk to Freestone.

How well I remember what a quiet delight it was to walk out and meet you, when you were coming to stay a week with me once at my lodgings. . . .

And now, Sir, when you next go to the British Museum, look for a Poet named Vaughan. Do you know him? I read some fine sacred poems of his in a Collection of John Mitford's: he selects them from a book of Vaughan's called 'Silex Scintillans,' 1621. He seems to have great fancy and fervour and some deep thought. Yet many of the things are in the tricksy spirit of that time: but there is a little Poem beginning 'They are all gone into a World of Light,' etc., which shews him to be capable of much.

Again farewell, my dear Allen: give my best remembrances to Mrs. Allen, who must think that I write to you as if you were still a Bachelor.

Indeed, I think you had best burn this letter suddenly, after you have read my commissions. [Greek text]. There--I believe I can construe that pa.s.sage as well as Porson.

BOULGE HALL, WOODBRIDGE.

[1837.]

MY DEAR ALLEN,

Another commission in so short a time is rather too bad: but I know not to whom I can apply but to yourself: for our bookseller here could not get me what I want, seeing that I don't exactly know myself. The book I want is an Athenaeus, but the edition I know not: and therefore I apply to you who know my taste. . . .

There is a small Cottage of my Father's close to the Lawn gates, where I shall fit up a room most probably. The garden I have already begun to work in. . . . Sometimes when I have sat dreaming about my own comforts I have thought to myself 'If Allen ever would come and stay with me some days at my Cottage if I live there'--but I think you would not: 'could not' you will say, and perhaps truly. . . .

I am reading Plutarch's Lives, which is one of the most delightful books I ever read. He must have been a Gentleman. My Aristophanes is nearly drained: that is, for the present first reading: for he will never be dry, apply as often as I may. My sisters are reading to me Lyell's Geology of an Evening: there is an admirable chapter ill.u.s.trative of human error and prejudice r.e.t.a.r.ding the truth, which will apply to all sciences, I believe: and, if people would consider it, would be more valuable than the geological knowledge, though that is very valuable, I am sure. You see my reading is so small that I can soon enumerate all my books: and here you have them. . . .

[BOULGE HALL, WOODBRIDGE, 21 _April_, 1837.]

DEAR ALLEN,

Have you done with my Doctor? If you have, will you send him to me here: Boulge Hall, Woodbridge, per Shannon Coach? You may book it at the Boar and Castle, Oxford Street, close by Hanway Pa.s.sage. This is not far out of your beat. Perhaps I should not have sent for this book (it is Bernard Barton the Quaker who asks to read it) but that it gives me an excuse also to talk a little to you. Ah! I wish you were here to walk with me now that the warm weather is come at last. Things have been delayed but to be more welcome, and to burst forth twice as thick and beautiful. This is boasting however, and counting of the chickens before they are hatched: the East winds may again plunge us back into winter: but the sunshine of this morning fills one's pores with jollity, as if one had taken laughing gas. Then my house is getting on: the books are up in the bookshelves and do my heart good: then Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrims are over the fireplace: Shakespeare in a recess: how I wish you were here for a day or two! My sister is very well and cheerful and we have kept house very pleasantly together. My brother John's wife is, I fear, declining very fast: it is very probable that I shall have to go and see her before long: though this is a visit I should gladly be spared. They say that her mind is in a very beautiful state of peacefulness. She _may_ rally in the summer: but the odds are much against her. We shall lose a perfect Lady, in the complete sense of the word, when she dies.

I have been doing very little since I have been here: having accomplished only a few Idylls of Theocritus, which harmonize with this opening of the fine weather. Is all this poor occupation for a man who has a soul to account for? You think so certainly. My dear Allen, you, with your accustomed humility, asked me if I did not think you changed when I was last in London: never did I see man less so: indeed you stand on too sure a footing to change, I am persuaded. But you will not thank me for telling you these things: but I wish you to believe that I rejoice as much as ever in the thought of you, and feel confident that you will ever be to me the same best of friends that you ever have been. I owe more to you than to all others put together. I am sure, for myself, that the main difference in our opinions (considered so destructive to friendship by so many pious men) is a difference in the Understanding, not in the Heart: and though you may not agree entirely in this, I am confident that it will never separate you from me.

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 compa.s.s?

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 b.u.mps 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 b.u.mp 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 pa.s.sion, 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 sh.o.r.e, going out in boats, etc. All this must have an end: and as usual my pleasure in his stay is proportionably darkened by the antic.i.p.ation 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 Ca.n.a.lettis--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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.s: 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.