Letters of Edward FitzGerald Volume I Part 7

DEAR LAURENCE,

. . . We have had much rain which has hindered the sporting part of our company: but has not made much difference to me. One or two sunshiny days have made me say within myself, 'how felicitously and at once would Laurence hit off an outline in this clear atmosphere.' For this fresh sunlight is not a mere dead medium of light, but is so much vital champagne both to sitter and to artist. London will become worse as it becomes bigger, which it does every hour.

I don't see much prospect of my going to c.u.mberland this winter: though I should like to go snipe-shooting with that literary shot James Spedding.

Do you mean to try and go up Skiddaw? You will get out upon it from your bedroom window: so I advise you to begin before you go down to breakfast.

There is a mountain called Dod, which has felt me upon its summit. It is not one of the highest in that range. Remember me to Grisedale Pike; a very well-bred mountain. If you paint--put him not only in a good light, but to leeward of you in a strong current of air. . . .

Farewell for the present.

_To F. Tennyson_.

LONDON, _Jan_. 16, 1841.

DEAR FREDERIC,

I have just concluded, with all the throes of imprudent pleasure, the purchase of a large picture by Constable, of which, if I can continue in the mood, I will enclose you a sketch. It is very good: but how you and Morton would abuse it! Yet this, being a sketch, escapes some of Constable's faults, and might escape some of your censures. The trees are not splashed with that white sky-mud, which (according to Constable's theory) the Earth scatters up with her wheels in travelling so briskly round the sun; and there is a dash and felicity in the execution that gives one a thrill of good digestion in one's room, and the thought of which makes one inclined to jump over the children's heads in the streets. But if you could see my great enormous Venetian Picture you would be extonished. Does the thought ever strike you, when looking at pictures in a house, that you are to run and jump at one, and go right through it into some behind-scene world on the other side, as Harlequins do? A steady portrait especially invites one to do so: the quietude of it ironically tempts one to outrage it: one feels it would close again over the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened. That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan b.u.t.ting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an alt.i.tude: no wonder his view of Bacon's virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding's forehead: we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the lake of Geneva. We have great laughing over this. The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe: or Glamorganshire: or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has gone to spend its Christmas there.

[A water-colour sketch of Constable's picture.]

This you see is a sketch of my ill.u.s.trious new purchase. The two animals in the water are cows: that on the bank a dog: and that in the glade of the wood a man or woman as you may choose. I can't say my drawing gives you much idea of my picture, except as to the composition of it: and even that depends on the colour and disposition of light and shade. The effect of the light breaking under the trees is very beautiful in the original: but this can only be given in water-colours on thick paper, where one can scratch out the lights. One would fancy that Constable had been looking at that fine picture of Gainsborough's in the National: the Watering Place: which is superior, in my mind, to all the Claudes there.

But this is perhaps because I am an Englishman and not an Italian.

_To W. H. Thompson_. {79a}

[18_th_ _Feb._ 1841.]

* BOULGE HALL, WOODBRIDGE.

* Doesn't this name express heavy clay? {79b}

MY DEAR THOMPSON,

I wish you would write to me ten lines to say how you are. You are, I suppose, at Cambridge: and I am buried (with all my fine parts, what a shame) here: so that I hear of n.o.body--except that Spedding and I abuse each other about Shakespeare occasionally: a subject on which you must know that he has lost his conscience, if ever he had any. For what did Dr. Allen . . . say when he felt Spedding's head? Why, that all his b.u.mps were so tempered that there was no merit in his sobriety--then what would have been the use of a Conscience to him? Q. E. D.

Since I saw you, I have entered into a decidedly agricultural course of conduct: read books about composts, etc. I walk about in the fields also where the people are at work, and the more dirt acc.u.mulates on my shoes, the more I think I know. Is not this all funny? Gibbon might elegantly compare my retirement from the cares and splendours of the world to that of Diocletian. Have you read Thackeray's little book--the second Funeral of Napoleon? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy it: as each copy sold puts 7.5_d._ in T.'s pocket: which is very empty just now, I take it. I think this book is the best thing he has done. What an account there is of the Emperor Nicholas in Kemble's last Review, {80a} the last sentence of it (which can be by no other man in Europe but Jack himself) has been meat and drink to me for a fortnight. The electric eel at the Adelaide Gallery is nothing to it. Then Edgeworth fires away about the Odes of Pindar, {80b} and Donne is very aesthetic about Mr.

Hallam's Book. {80c} What is the meaning of 'exegetical'? Till I know that, how can I understand the Review?

Pray remember me kindly to Blakesley, Heath, and such other potentates as I knew in the days before they 'a.s.sumed the purple.' I am reading Gibbon, and see nothing but this d---d colour before my eyes. It changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial colour in China, and also the ant.i.thesis to purple (_vide_ Coleridge and Eastlake's Goethe)--even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are ant.i.thetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same (_vide_ Coleridge, etc.) Is this aesthetic? is this exegetical? How glad I shall be if you can a.s.sure me that it is. But, nonsense apart and begged-pardon-for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to this pretty place.

'The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay: with a subsoil or pan of an adhesive silicious brick formation: adapted to the growth of wheat, beans, and clover--requiring however a summer fallow (as is generally stipulated in the lease) every fourth year, etc.' This is not an unpleasing style on Agricultural subjects--nor an uncommon one.

_To F. Tennyson_.

BOULGE HALL, WOODBRIDGE.

[21 March, 1841.]

DEAR FREDERIC TENNYSON,

I was very glad indeed to get a letter from you this morning. You here may judge, by the very nature of things, that I lose no time in answering it. I did not receive your Sicilian letter: and have been for a year and half quite ignorant of what part of the world you were in. I supposed you were alive: though I don't quite know why. De non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem est ratio. I heard from Morton three months ago: he was then at Venice: very tired of it: but lying on such luxurious sofas that he could not make up his mind to move from them. He wanted to meet you: or at all events to hear of you. I wrote to him, but could tell him nothing. I have also seen Alfred once or twice since you have gone: he is to be found in certain conjunctions of the stars at No. 8 Charlotte Street. . . . All our other friends are in statu quo: Spedding residing calmly in Lincoln's Inn Fields: at the Colonial all day: at the play and smoking at night: occasionally to be found in the Edinburgh Review. Pollock and the Lawyer tribe travel to and fro between their chambers in the Temple and Westminster Hall: occasionally varying their travels, when the Chancellor chooses, to the Courts in Lincoln's Inn. As to me, I am fixed here where your letter found me: very rarely going to London: and staying there but a short time when I do go. You, Morton, Spedding, Thackeray, and Alfred, were my chief solace there: and only Spedding is now to be found. Thackeray lives in Paris.

From this you may judge that I have no such sights to tell of as you have. Neither do _mortaletti_ ever go off at Boulge: which is perhaps not to be regretted. Day follows day with unvaried movement: there is the same level meadow with geese upon it always lying before my eyes: the same pollard oaks: with now and then the butcher or the washerwoman trundling by in their carts. As you have lived in Lincolnshire I will not further describe Suffolk. No new books (except a perfectly insane one of Carlyle, {82} who is becoming very obnoxious now that he is become popular), nor new pictures, no music. A game at picquet of two hours duration closes each day. But for that I might say with t.i.tus--perdidi diem. Oh Lord! all this is not told you that you may admire my philosophic quietude, etc.; pray don't think that. I should travel like you if I had the eyes to see that you have: but, as Goethe says, the eye can but see what it brings with it the power of seeing. If anything I had seen in my short travels had given me any new ideas worth having I should travel more: as it is, I see your Italian lakes and cities in the Picturesque Annuals as well as I should in the reality. You have a more energetic, stirring, acquisitive, and capacious soul. I mean all this seriously, believe me: but I won't say any more about it. Morton also is a capital traveller: I wish he would keep notes of what he sees, and publish them one day.

I must however tell you that I am becoming a Farmer! Can you believe in this? I hope we shall both live to laugh over it together. When do you mean to come back? Pray do not let so long a time elapse again without writing to me: never mind a long letter: write something to say you are alive and where. Rome certainly is nearer England than Naples: so perhaps you are coming back. Bring Morton back with you. I will then go to London and we will smoke together and be as merry as sandboys. We will all sit under the calm shadow of Spedding's forehead. People talk of a war with America. Poor dear old England! she makes a gallant shew in her old age. If Englishmen are to travel, I am glad that such as you are abroad--good specimens of Englishmen: with the proper fierte about them. The greater part are poor wretches that go to see oranges growing, and hear Bellini for eighteen-pence. I hope the English are as proud and disagreeable as ever. What an odd thing that the Italians like such martial demonstrations as you describe--not at all odd, probably--their spirit begins and goes off in noise and smoke. It is like all other grand aspirations. So ---'s Epics crepitate in Sonnets. All I ask of you is to write no Sonnets on what you see or hear--no sonnets can sound well after Daddy Wordsworth, ---, etc., who have now succeeded in quite spoiling one's pleasure in Milton's--and they are heavy things. The words 'subjective and objective' are getting into general use now, and Donne has begun with _aesthetics_ and _exegetical_ in Kemble's review.

Kemble himself has written an article on the Emperor Nicholas which must crush him. If you could read it, no salvos of _mortalletti_ could ever startle you again. And now my paper is almost covered: and I must say Good bye to you. This is Sunday March 21--a fine sunny blowing day. We shall dine at one o'clock--an hour hence--go to Church--then walk--have tea at six, and pa.s.s rather a dull evening, because of no picquet. You will be sauntering in St. Peter's perhaps, or standing on the Capitol while the sun sets. I should like to see Rome after all. Livy's lies (as the aesthetics prove them to be) do at least animate one so far--how far?--so far as to wish, and not to do, having perfect power to do.

Oh eloquent, just, and mighty Theory of Mortaletti!

_To W. H. Thompson_.

BOULGE HALL, WOODBRIDGE, _March_ 26/41.

MY DEAR THOMPSON,

. . . I had a long letter from Morton the other day--he is still luxuriating at Venice. Also a letter from Frederic Tennyson, who has been in Sicily, etc., and is much distracted between enjoyment of those climates and annoyance from Fleas. These two men are to be at Rome together soon: so if any one wants to go to Rome, now is a good time. I wish I was there. F. Tennyson says that he and a party of Englishmen fought a cricket match with the crew of the Bellerophon on the _Parthenopaean hills_ (query about the correctness of this--I quote from memory), and _sacked_ the sailors by 90 runs. Is not this pleasant?--the notion of good English blood striving in worn out Italy--I like that such men as Frederic should be abroad: so strong, haughty and pa.s.sionate. They keep up the English character abroad. . . . Have you read poor Carlyle's raving book about heroes? Of course you have, or I would ask you to buy my copy. I don't like to live with it in the house. It smoulders. He ought to be laughed at a little. But it is pleasant to retire to the Tale of a Tub, Tristram Shandy, and Horace Walpole, after being tossed on his canvas waves. This is blasphemy. Dibdin Pitt of the Coburg could enact one of his heroes. . . .

_To F. Tennyson_.

IRELAND, _July_ 26, 1841.

MY DEAR FREDERIC,

I got your letter ten days ago in London on my way here. We have incessant rain, which is as bad as your sciroccos; at least it damps my energies very much. But people are accustomed to it in Ireland: and my uncle (in whose house I am staying) is just set off with three of his children--on horseback--cantering and laughing away in the midst of a hopeless shower. I am afraid some of us are too indolent for such things.

I am glad Morton has taken up painting in good earnest, and I shall encourage him to persevere as much as I can. . . . I have begun to draw a little--the fit comes upon one in summer with the foliage: as to sunshine, so necessary for pictures, I have been obliged to do without that. We have had scarce a ray for a month . . . I have read nothing, except the Annual Register: which is not amiss in a certain state of mind, and is not easily exhausted. A goodly row of some hundred very thick volumes which may be found in every country town wherever one goes forbid all danger of exhaustion. So long as there is appet.i.te, there is food: and of that plain substantial nature which, Johnson says, suits the stomach of middle life. Burke, for instance, is a sufficiently poetical politician to interest one just when one's sonneteering age is departing, but before one has come down quite to arid fact. Do you know anything of poor Sir Egerton Brydges?--this, in talking of sonnets--poor fellow, he wrote them for seventy years, fully convinced of their goodness, and only lamenting that the public were unjust and stupid enough not to admire them also. He lived in haughty seclusion, and at the end of life wrote a doating Autobiography. He writes good prose however, and shews himself as he is very candidly: indeed he is proud of the display.

All this is not meant to be a lesson to you who write, everybody says, good sonnets. Sir E. Brydges would have been the same dilettante if he had written Epics--probably worse. I certainly don't like sonnets, as you know: we have been spoiled for them by Daddy Wordsworth, ---, and Co.

Moxon must write them too forsooth. What do they seem fit for but to serve as little shapes in which a man may mould very mechanically any single thought which comes into his head, which thought is not lyrical enough in itself to exhale in a more lyrical measure? The difficulty of the sonnet metre in English is a good excuse for the dull didactic thoughts which naturally incline towards it: fellows know there is no danger of decanting their muddy stuff ever so slowly: they are neither prose nor poetry. I have rather a wish to tie old Wordsworth's volume about his neck and pitch him into one of the deepest holes of his dear Duddon.

But it is very stupid to write all this to Italy, though it would have done very well to have canva.s.sed with you and Morton over our pipes in Mornington Crescent. I suppose you never will come back to stay long in England again: I have given you up to a warmer lat.i.tude. If you were more within reach, I would make you go a trip with me to the West of Ireland, whither I am not confident enough to go alone. Yet I wish to see it.

_To Bernard Barton_.

EDGEWORTHSTOWN, _September_ 2/41.

MY DEAR BARTON,

You must allow I am a good correspondent--this half year at least. This is Septr. 2, a most horrible day for a Bazaar, judging at least by the weather here. But you may be better off. I came to this house a week ago to visit a male friend, who duly started to England the day before I got here. I therefore found myself domiciled in a house filled with ladies of divers ages--Edgeworth's wife, aged--say 28--his mother aged 74--his sister (the great Maria) aged 72--and another cousin or something--all these people very pleasant and kind: the house pleasant: the grounds ditto: a good library: . . . so here I am quite at home. But surely I must go to England soon: it seems to me as if that must take place soon: and so send me a letter directed to me at Mr. Watcham's, Naseby, Thornby. Those places are in England. You may put Northampton after Thornby if you like. I am going to look at the winding up of the harvest there.

I am now writing in the Library here: and the great Auth.o.r.ess is as busy as a bee making a catalogue of her books beside me, chattering away. We are great friends. She is as lively, active, and cheerful as if she were but twenty; really a very entertaining person. We talk about Walter Scott whom she adores, and are merry all the day long. I have read about thirty-two sets of novels since I have been here: it has rained nearly all the time.

I long to hear how the Bazaar went off: and so I beg you to tell me all about it. When I began this letter I thought I had something to say: but I believe the truth was I had nothing to do. When you see my dear Major {89} give him my love, and tell him I wish he were here to go to Connemara with me: I have no heart to go alone. The discomfort of Irish inns requires a companion in misery. This part of the country is poorer than any I have yet seen: the people becoming more Spanish also in face and dress. Have you read The Collegians? {90a}

I have now begun to sketch heads on the blotting paper on which my paper rests--a sure sign, as Miss Edgeworth tells me, that I have said quite enough. She is right. Good-bye. In so far as this country is Ireland I am glad to be here: but inasmuch as it is not England I wish I were there.

_To S. Laurence_.

NASEBY, _Septr_. 28/41.

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

. . . Do you know that I wanted you to come down by the railroad and see me here: where there is nothing else to be seen but myself: which would have been a comfort to you. I have been staying here three weeks alone, smoking with farmers, looking at their lands, and taking long walks alone: during which (as well as when I was in Ireland) I made such sketches as will make you throw down your brush in despair. I wish you would ask at Molteno's or Colnaghi's for a new Lithographic print of a head of Dante, after a fres...o...b.. Giotto, lately discovered in some chapel {90b} at Florence. It is the most wonderful head that ever was seen--Dante at about twenty-seven years old: rather younger. The Edgeworths had a print in Ireland: got by great interest in Florence before the legitimate publication: but they told me it was to be abroad in September. If you can get me a copy, pray do.