Letters of Edward FitzGerald Volume II Part 31

_Nov._ 8/82.

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

It is long since I have heard from you: which means, long since I have written to you. But do not impute this to as long forgetfulness on my part. My days and years go on one so like another: I see and hear no new thing or person; and to tell you that I go for a month or a week to our barren coast, which is all the travel I have to tell of, you can imagine all that as easily as my stay at home, with the old Pictures about me, and often the old Books to read. I went indeed to London last February for the sole purpose of seeing our Donne: and glad am I to have done so as I heard it gave him a little pleasure. That is a closed Book now. His Death {337} was not unexpected, and even not to be deprecated, as you know; but I certainly never remember a year of such havock among my friends as this: if not by Death itself, by Death's preliminary work and warning. . . . I wonder to find myself no worse dealt with than by Bronchitis, bad enough, which came upon me last Christmas, hung upon me all Spring, Summer, and Autumn; and though comparatively dormant for the last three wet weeks (perhaps from repeated doses of Sea Air) gives occasional Signs that it is not dead, but, on the contrary, will revive with Winter. Let me hear at least how you have been, and how are; I shall not grudge your being all well.

Aldis Wright has sent me a very fine Photo of Spedding done from one of Mrs. Cameron's of which a copy is at Trinity Lodge. It is so fine that I scarce know if it gives me more pleasure or pain to look at it. Insomuch that I keep it in a drawer, not yet able to make up my mind to have it framed and so hung up before me.

My good old Housekeeper has been (along with so many more) very ill, bedded for five or six weeks; only now able to get about again. I have this morning been scolding her for sending away a woman who came to do her work, without consulting me beforehand: she makes out that the woman wanted to go: I find the woman is very ready to return. 'These are my troubles, Mr. Wesley,' as a Gentleman said to him when the Footman had put too much coal on the fire.

_To W. F. Pollock_.

WOODBRIDGE. [1882.]

MY DEAR POLLOCK,

. . . The Book which has really, and deeply, interested me, and quite against Expectation, is Froude's Carlyle Biography; which has (quite contrary to expectation also) not only made me honour Carlyle more, but even love him, which I had never taken into account before. In the Biography, Froude seems to me to treat his man with Candour and Justice: even a little too severe in attributing to systematic Selfishness what seems to me rather unreflecting neglect, Carlyle's relations to his Wife, whom, so far as we read, he loved. Of his Love for his own Family, his Generosity to them, and his own st.u.r.dy refusal of help from others, one cannot doubt.

_To C. E. Norton_.

WOODBRIDGE. _Dec._ 20, [1882].

MY DEAR NORTON,

. . . You may have read somewhere of an 'Ajax' at our Cambridge over here. Thirty years ago did I tell the Greek Professor (now Master of Trinity), 'Have a Greek Tragedy in (what you call) your Senate-house.'

But I was not sufficiently important to stir up the 'Dons.' Cowell invited me to see and hear 'Ajax'; but I remained here, content to snuff at it from the Athenaeum of England, not of Attica. And on the very day that Ajax fretted his hour on the stage, my two old Housekeepers were celebrating their Fiftieth, or Golden, wedding over a Bottle of Port wine in the adjoining room, though in that happier Catastrophe I did not further join.

Now, to end with myself; I have hitherto escaped any severe a.s.sault from my 'Bosom-Enemy,' Bronchitis, though he occasionally intimates that he is all safe in his Closet, and will reappear with the b.u.t.terflies, I dare say. 'Dici Beatus' let no one in this country boast till May be over.

What you put off, and what you put on, Never change till May be gone,

says an old Suffolk Proverb concerning our Clothing. Five of my friendly contemporaries have been struck with Paralysis during this 1882: and here am I with only Bronchitis to complain of.

WOODBRIDGE. _March_ 7/83.

MY DEAR NORTON,

I wrote to you some little while before Christmas, praying you, among other things, not to put yourself to the trouble of sending me your Emerson-Carlyle Correspondence, inasmuch as I could easily get it over here; and, by way of answer, your two Volumes reached me yesterday, safe and sound from over the Atlantic. I had not time (a strange accident with me) to acknowledge the receipt of them yesterday: but make all speed to do so, with all grat.i.tude, to-day. As you are simply the Editor of the Book, I may tell you something of my thoughts on it by and by. I doubt not that I shall find Emerson's Letters the more interesting, because the newer, to me. The Portrait at the head of Vol. II. a.s.sures me that one will find only what is good in them.

. . . I was glad to find from Mozley's Oriel Reminiscences that Newman had been an admirer of my old Crabbe; and Mr. L. Stephen has very kindly written out for me a pa.s.sage from some late work, or Lecture, of Newman's own, in which he says that, after fifty years, he read 'Richard's Story of his Boyhood,' in the Tales of the Hall, with the same delight as on its first appearance, and he considers that a Poem which thus pleases in Age as it pleased in Youth must be called (in the 'accidental' sense of the word, logically speaking) 'Cla.s.sical.'

I owe this Courtesy on Mr. Stephen's part to my having sent him a little Preface to my Crabbe, in which I contested Mr. Stephen's judgment as to Crabbe's Humour: and I did not choose to publish this without apprizing him, whom I know so far as he is connected with the Thackerays. He replied very kindly, and sent me the Newman quotation I tell you of. The Crabbe is the same I sent you some years ago: left in sheets, except the few Copies I sent to friends. And now I have tacked to it a little Introduction, and sent forty copies to lie on Quaritch's counter: for I do not suppose they will get further. And no great harm done if they stay where they are. . . .

One day you must write, and tell me how you and yours have fared through this winter. It has been a very mild, even, a warm, one over here; and I for my part have not yet had much to complain of in point of health thus far; no, not even though winter has come at last in Snow and Storm for the last three days. I do not know if we are yet come to the worst, so terrible a Gale has been predicted, I am told, for the middle of March.

Yesterday morning I distinctly heard the sea moaning some dozen miles away; and to-day, why, the enclosed little sc.r.a.p, {342} enclosed to me, will tell you what it was about, on my very old Crabbe's sh.o.r.e. It (the Sea) will a.s.suredly cut off his old Borough from the Slaughden River-quay where he went to work, and whence he sailed in the 'Unity' Smack (one of whose Crew is still alive) on his first adventure to London. But all this can but little interest you, considering that we in England (except some few in this Eastern corner of it) scarce know more of Crabbe and his where about than by name.

_To W. F. Pollock_.

[_Easter_, 1883].

MY DEAR POLLOCK,

. . . Professor Norton sent me his Carlyle-Emerson--all to the credit of all parties, I think. I must tell the Professor that in my opinion he should have omitted some personal observations which are all fair in a private letter; as about Tennyson being of a 'gloomy' turn (which you know is not so), Thackeray's 'enormous appet.i.te' ditto; and such mention of Richard Milnes as a 'Robin Redbreast,' etc.; which may be less untrue, though not more proper to be published of a clever, useful, and amiable man, now living.

_To C. E. Norton_.

WOODBRIDGE. _May_ 12/83.

MY DEAR NORTON,

Your Emerson-Carlyle of course interested me very much, as I believe a large public also. I had most to learn of Emerson, and that all good: but Carlyle came out in somewhat of a new light to me also. Now we have him in his Jane's letters, as we had seen something of him before in the Reminiscences: but a yet more tragic Story; so tragic that I know not if it ought not to have been withheld from the Public: a.s.suredly, it seems to me, ought to have been but half of the whole that now is. But I do not the less recognize Carlyle for more admirable than before--if for no other reason than his thus furnishing the world with weapons against himself which the World in general is glad to turn against him. . . .

And, by way of finishing what I have to say on Carlyle for the present, I will tell you that I had to go up to our huge, hideous, London a week ago, on disagreeable business; which Business, however, I got over in time for me to run to Chelsea before I returned home at Evening. I wanted to see the Statue on the Chelsea Embankment which I had not yet seen: and the old No. 5 of Cheyne Row, which I had not seen for five and twenty years. The Statue I thought very good, though looking somewhat small and ill set-off by its dingy surroundings. And No. 5 (now 24), which had cost her so much of her Life, one may say, to make habitable for him, now all neglected, unswept, ungarnished, uninhabited

'TO LET'

I cannot get it out of my head, the tarnished Scene of the Tragedy (one must call it) there enacted.

Well, I was glad to get away from it, and the London of which it was a small part, and get down here to my own dull home, and by no means sorry not to be a Genius at such a Cost. 'Parlons d'autres choses.'

I got our Woodbridge Bookseller to enquire for your Mr. Child's Ballad- book; but could only hear, and indeed be shown a specimen, of a large Quarto Edition, _de luxe_ I believe, and would not meddle with that. I do not love any unwieldy Book, even a Dictionary; and I believe that I am contented enough with such Knowledge as I have of the old Ballads in many a handy Edition. Not but I admire Mr. Child for such an undertaking as his; but I think his Book will be more for Great Libraries, Public or Private, than for my scanty Shelves at my age of seventy-five. I have already given away to Friends all that I had of any rarity or value, especially if over octavo.

By the way there was one good observation, I think, in Mrs. Oliphant's superficial, or hasty, History of English 18th Century Literature, viz., that when the Beatties, Blacks, and other recognized Poets of the Day were all writing in a 'cla.s.sical' way, and tried to persuade Burns to do the like, it was certain Old Ladies who wrote so many of the Ballads, which, many of them, have pa.s.sed as ancient, 'Sir Patrick Spence' for one, I think.

Our Spring flowers have been almost all spoilt by Winter weather, and the Trees before my window only just now beginning to

Stand in a mist of Green,

as Tennyson sings. Let us hope their Verdure, late arrayed, will last the longer. I continue pretty well, with occasional reminders from Bronchitis, who is my established Brownie.

_To S. Laurence_.

WOODBRIDGE. _Tuesday_, [_June_ 12, 1883].

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

It is very kind of you to remember one who does so little to remind you of himself. Your drawing of Allen always seemed to me excellent, for which reason it was that I thought his Wife should have it, as being the Record of her husband in his younger days. So of the portrait of Tennyson which I gave his Wife. Not that I did not value them myself, but because I did value them, as the most agreeable Portraits I knew of the two men; and, for that very reason, presented them to those whom they were naturally dearer to than even to myself. I have never liked any Portrait of Tennyson since he grew a Beard; Allen, I suppose, has kept out of that.

If I do not write, it is because I have absolutely nothing to tell you that you have not known for the last twenty years. Here I live still, reading, and being read to, part of my time; walking abroad three or four times a day, or night, in spite of wakening a Bronchitis, which has lodged like the household 'Brownie' within; pottering about my Garden (as I have just been doing) and snipping off dead Roses like Miss Tox; and now and then a visit to the neighbouring Seaside, and a splash to Sea in one of the Boats. I never see a new Picture, nor hear a note of Music except when I drum out some old Tune in Winter on an Organ, which might almost be carried about the Streets with a handle to turn, and a Monkey on the top of it. So I go on, living a life far too comfortable as compared with that of better, and wiser men: but ever expecting a reverse in health such as my seventy-five years are subject to. What a tragedy is that of ---! So brisk, bright, good, a little woman, who seemed made to live! And now the Doctors allot her but two years longer at most, and her friends think that a year will see the End! and poor ---, tender, true, and brave! His letters to me are quite fine in telling about it.

Mrs. Kemble wrote me word some two or three months ago that he was looking very old: no wonder. I am told that she keeps up her Spirits the better of the two. Ah, Providence might have spared 'pauvre et triste Humanite' that Trial, together with a few others which (one would think) would have made no difference to its Supremacy. 'Voila ma pet.i.te protestation respectueuse a la Providence,' as Madame de Sevigne says.

To-morrow I am going (for my one annual Visit) to G. Crabbe's, where I am to meet his Sisters, and talk over old Bredfield Vicarage days. Two of my eight Nieces are now with me here in my house, for a two months'

visit, I suppose and hope. And I think this is all I have to tell you of

Yours ever sincerely E. F. G.

This was in all probability the last letter FitzGerald ever wrote. On the following day, Wednesday, June 13, he went to pay his annual visit at Merton Rectory. On Friday the 15th I received from Mr. Crabbe the announcement of his peaceful end: 'I grieve to have to tell you that our dear friend Edward FitzGerald died here this morning [June 14]. He came last evening to pay his usual visit with my sisters, but did not seem in his usual spirits, and did not eat anything. . . . At ten he said he would go to bed. I went up with him. . . . At a quarter to eight I tapped at his door to ask how he was, and getting no answer went in and found him as if sleeping peacefully but quite dead. A very n.o.ble character has pa.s.sed away.' On the following Tuesday, June 19, he was buried in the little churchyard of Boulge, and the stone which marks his grave bears the simple inscription 'Edward FitzGerald, Born 31 March 1809, Died 14 June 1883. It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.'