Footnotes:

‘The Game-dealer here telling me that he has some very good Pheasants, I have told him to send you a Brace—to go in company with Braces to Carlyle, and Mrs. Kemble. This will, you may think, necessitate your writing a Reply of Thanks before your usual time of writing: but don’t do that:—only write to me now in case the Pheasants don’t reach you; I know you will thank me for them, whether they reach you or not; and so you can defer writing so much till you happen next upon an idle moment which you may think as well devoted to me; you being the only man, except Donne, who cares to trouble himself with a gratuitous letter to one who really does not deserve it.

‘Donne, you know, is pleased with Everybody, and with Everything that Anybody does for him. You must take his Praises of Woodbridge with this grain of Salt to season them. It may seem odd to you at first—but not perhaps on reflection—that I feel more—nervous, I may say—at the prospect of meeting with an old Friend, after all these years, than of any indifferent Acquaintance. I feel it the less with Donne, for the reason aforesaid—why should I not feel it with you who have given so many tokens since our last meeting that you are well willing to take me as I am? If one is, indeed, by Letter what one is in person.—I always tell Donne not to come out of his way here—he says he takes me in the course of a Visit to some East-Anglian kinsmen. Have you ever any such reason?—Well; if you have no better reason than that of really wishing to see me, for better or worse, in my home, come—some Spring or Summer day, when my Home at any rate is pleasant. This all sounds mock-modesty; but it is not; as I can’t read Books, Plays, Pictures, etc. and don’t see People, I feel, when a Man comes, that I have all to ask and nothing to tell; and one doesn’t like to make a Pump of a Friend.’

‘On plante des pommiers ès bords Des cimitieres, près des morts, &c

Olivier Basselin (‘Vaux-de-Vire,’ ed Jacob, 1858, xv. p. 28)

On Oct 13th, 1879, FitzGerald wrote of a copy of Olivier (ed. Du Bois, 1821) which he had sent by me to Professor Cowell: “If Cowell does not care for Olivier—the dear Phantom!—pray do you keep him. Read a little piece—the two first Stanzas—beginning ‘Dieu garde de deshonneur,’ p. 184—quite beautiful to me; though not classed as Olivier’s. Also ‘Royne des Flours, &c,’ p. 160. These are things that Béranger could not reach with all his Art; but Burns could without it.”

‘Lors sans viser au lieu dont elle vint, Et desprisant la gloire que l’on a En ce bas monde, icelle Anne ordonna, Que son corps fust entre les pauures mys En cette fosse. Or prions, chers amys, Que l’ame soit entre les pauures mise, Qui bien heureux sont chantez en l’Église.’

“At the beginning of this year I submitted to be Photo’ed at last—for many Nieces, and a few old Friends—I must think that you are an old Friend as well as a very kind and constant one; and so I don’t like not to send you what I have sent others.—The Artist who took me, took (as he always does) three several Views of one’s Face: but the third View (looking full-faced) got blurred by my blinking at the Light: so only these two were reproduced—I shouldn’t know that either was meant for [me]: nor, I think, would any one else, if not told: but the Truth-telling Sun somehow did them; and as he acted so handsomely by me, I take courage to distribute them to those who have a regard for me, and will naturally like to have so favourable a Version of one’s Outward Aspect to remember one by. I should not have sent them if they had been otherwise. The up-looking one I call ‘The Statesman,’ quite ready to be called to the Helm of Affairs: the Down-looking one I call The Philosopher. Will you take which you like? And when next old Spedding comes your way, give him the other (he won’t care which) with my Love. I only don’t write to him because my doing so would impose on his Conscience an Answer—which would torment him for some little while. I do not love him the less: and believe all the while that he not the less regards me.”

Again on May 5, he wrote: “I think I shall have a word about M[acready] from Mrs. Kemble, with whom I have been corresponding a little since her return to England. She has lately been staying with her Son in Law, Mr. Leigh (?), at Stoneleigh Vicarage, near Kenilworth. In the Autumn she says she will go to America, never to return to England. But I tell her she will return. She is to sit for her Photo at my express desire, and I have given her Instructions how to sit, derived from my own successful Experience. One rule is to sit—in a dirty Shirt—(to avoid dangerous White) and another is, not to sit on a Sunshiny Day: which we must leave to the Young.

“By the by, I sent old Spedding my own lovely Photo (the Statesman) which he has acknowledged in Autograph. He tells me that he begins to ‘smell Land’ with his Bacon.”

‘Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change.’

‘Bons habitans de ce Village, Prêtez l’oreille un moment,’ &c.

Each stanza ends:—

‘Et le bon Dieu vous benira.’

He adds: ‘One of the pleasantest remembrances of France is, having heard this sung to a Barrel-organ, and chorus’d by the Hearers (who had bought the Song-books) one fine Evening on the Paris Boulevards, June: 1830.’

‘Nature had but little clay Like that of which she moulded him.’

See ‘Letters,’ i. 75, note.

‘For his Bounty, There was no winter in ’t. An Anthony it was, That grew the more by reaping.’

Spedding admirably defended Theobald’s certain emendation of ‘autumn’ for ‘Anthony.’

‘Friend of distress! The mourner feels thy aid; She cannot pay thee, but thou wilt be paid.’

They had taken possession of FitzGerald’s memory in their present shape, for in a letter to me, dated 5 Nov. 1877, speaking of the poet’s son, who was Vicar of Bredfield, he says: “It is now just twenty years since the Brave old Boy was laid in Bredfield Churchyard. Two of his Father’s Lines might make Epitaph for some good soul:—

‘Friend of the Poor, the Wretched, the Betray’d; They cannot pay thee—but thou shalt be paid.’

Pas mal ça, eh!”

“A suggestion that casually fell from old Spedding’s lips (I forget how long ago) occurred to me the other day. Instead of

‘Do such business as the bitter day,’

read ‘better day’—a certain Emendation, I think. I hope you take Spedding into your Counsel; he might be induced to look over one Play at a time though he might shrink from all in a Body; and I scarce ever heard him conning a page of Shakespeare but he suggested something which was an improvement—on Shakespeare himself, if not on his Editors—though don’t [tell] Spedding that I say so, for God’s sake.”

“Spedding has (you know) a delicious little Paper about the Merchant of Venice in July Fraser:—but I think he is wrong in subordinating Shylock to the Comedy Part. If that were meant to be so, Williams [‘the divine Williams,’ as some Frenchman called Shakespeare] miscalculated, throwing so much of his very finest writing into the Jew’s Mouth, the downright human Nature of which makes all the Love-Story Child’s play, though very beautiful Child’s play indeed.”

‘A dozen years ago I entreated Annie Thackeray, Smith & Elder, &c., to bring out a Volume of Thackeray’s better Drawings. Of course they wouldn’t—now Windus and Chatto have, you know, brought out a Volume of his inferior: and now Annie T. S. & E. prepare a Volume—when it is not so certain to pay, at any rate, as when W. M. T. was the Hero of the Day. However, I send them all I have: pretty confident they will select the worst; of course, for my own part, I would rather have any other than copies of what I have: but I should like the World to acknowledge he could do something beside the ugly and ridiculous. Annie T. sent me the enclosed Specimen: very careless, but full of Character. I can see W. M. T. drawing it as he was telling one about his Scotch Trip. That disputatious Scotchman in the second Row with Spectacles, and—teeth. You may know some who will be amused at this:—but send it back, please: no occasion to write beside.’

‘I have no objection whatever to your quoting what I said of Edward Fitzgerald in the Atlantic Monthly, but I suppose you know that it was omitted from Bentley’s publication of my book at Edward’s own desire. He did not certainly knock me on the head with Dr. Johnson’s sledge-hammer, but he did make me feel painfully that I had been guilty of the impertinence of praising.’

I did not then avail myself of the permission so readily granted, but I venture to do so now, in the belief that the publicity from which his sensitive nature shrank during his lifetime may now without impropriety be given to what was written in all sincerity by one of his oldest and most intimate friends. It was Mrs. Kemble who described him as ‘an eccentric man of genius, who took more pains to avoid fame than others do to seek it,’ and this description is fully borne out by the account she gave of him in the offending passage which follows:—

“That Mrs. Fitzgerald is among the most vivid memories of my girlish days. She and her husband were kind and intimate friends of my father and mother. He was a most amiable and genial Irish gentleman, with considerable property in Ireland and Suffolk, and a fine house in Portland Place, and had married his cousin, a very handsome, clever, and eccentric woman. I remember she always wore a bracelet of his hair, on the massive clasp of which were engraved the words, ‘Stesso sangue, stessa sorte.’ I also remember, as a feature of sundry dinners at their house, the first gold dessert and table ornaments that I ever saw, the magnificence of which made a great impression upon me; though I also remember their being replaced, upon Mrs. Fitzgerald’s wearying of them, by a set of ground glass and dead and burnished silver, so exquisite that the splendid gold service was pronounced infinitely less tasteful and beautiful. One member of her family—her son Edward Fitzgerald—has remained my friend till this day. His parents and mine are dead. Of his brothers and sisters I retain no knowledge, but with him I still keep up an affectionate and to me most valuable and interesting correspondence. He was distinguished from the rest of his family, and indeed from most people, by the possession of very rare intellectual and artistic gifts. A poet, a painter, a musician, an admirable scholar and writer, if he had not shunned notoriety as sedulously as most people seek it, he would have achieved a foremost place among the eminent men of his day, and left a name second to that of very few of his contemporaries. His life was spent in literary leisure, or literary labours of love of singular excellence, which he never cared to publish beyond the circle of his intimate friends: Euphranor, Polonius, collections of dialogues full of keen wisdom, fine observation, and profound thought; sterling philosophy written in the purest, simplest, and raciest English; noble translations, or rather free adaptations of Calderon’s two finest dramas, The Wonderful Magician and Life’s a Dream, and a splendid paraphrase of the Agamemnon of Æschylus, which fills its reader with regret that he should not have Englished the whole of the great trilogy with the same severe sublimity. In America this gentleman is better known by his translation or adaptation (how much more of it is his own than the author’s I should like to know if I were Irish) of Omar Khayyám, the astronomer-poet of Persia. Archbishop Trench, in his volume on the life and genius of Calderon, frequently refers to Mr. Fitzgerald’s translations, and himself gives a version of Life’s a Dream, the excellence of which falls short, however, of his friend’s finer dramatic poem bearing the same name, though he has gallantly attacked the difficulty of rendering the Spanish in English verse. While these were Edward Fitzgerald’s studies and pursuits, he led a curious life of almost entire estrangement from society, preferring the companionship of the rough sailors and fishermen of the Suffolk coast to that of lettered folk. He lived with them in the most friendly intimacy, helping them in their sea ventures, and cruising about with one, an especially fine sample of his sort, in a small fishing-smack which Edward Fitzgerald’s bounty had set afloat, and in which the translator of Calderon and Æschylus passed his time, better pleased with the fellowship and intercourse of the captain and crew of his small fishing craft than with that of more educated and sophisticated humanity. He and his brothers were school-fellows of my eldest brother under Dr. Malkin, the master of the grammar school of Bury St. Edmunds.”

‘York Farm, Branchtown. ‘Tuesday, Dec. 14. 1875.

‘My dear Edward FitzGerald,

‘I have got a printing-machine and am going to try and write to you upon it and see if it will suit your eyes better than my scrawl of handwriting. Thank you for the Photographs and the line of music; I know that old bit of tune, it seems to me. I think Mr. Irving’s face more like Young’s than my Father’s. Tom Taylor, years ago, told me that Miss Ellen Terry would be a consummate comic actress. Portia should never be without some one to set her before the Public. She is my model woman.’

‘Last week my old friend Edward Fitzgerald (Omar Kyam, you know), sent me a beautiful miniature of my mother, which his mother—her intimate friend—had kept till her death, and which had been painted for Mrs. Fitzgerald. It is a full-length figure, very beautifully painted, and very like my mother. Almost immediately after receiving this from England, my friend Mr. Horace Furness came out to see me. He is a great collector of books and prints, and brought me an old engraving of my mother in the character of Urania, which a great many years ago I remember to have seen, and which was undoubtedly the original of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s miniature. I thought the concidence of their both reaching me at the same time curious.’

“I have taken refuge from the Eastern Question in Boccaccio, just as the ‘piacevoli Donne’ who tell the Stories escaped from the Plague. I suppose one must read this in Italian as my dear Don in Spanish: the Language of each fitting the Subject ‘like a Glove.’ But there is nothing to come up to the Don and his Man.”

“I was perfectly miserable when the curtain fell, and the poor young author, as pale as a ghost, came forward to meet my father at the side scene, and bravely holding out his hand to him said, ‘Never mind, Mr. Kemble, I’ll do better another time.’”

‘Why, Fitz,’ said Tennyson, ‘that’s a verse, and a very bad one too.’ And they would afterwards humorously contend for the authorship of the worst line in the English language.

‘I see by Athenæum that Charles Tennyson (Turner) is dead. Now people will begin to talk of his beautiful Sonnets: small, but original, things, as well as beautiful. Especially after that somewhat absurd Sale of the Brothers’ early Editions.’

“Besides her, Mrs. Kemble, who has lately lost her Sister, and returned from Switzerland to London just at a time when most of her Friends are out of it—she wants to see me, an old Friend of hers and her Family’s, whom she has not seen for more than twenty years. So I do hope to do my ‘petit possible’ to solace both these poor Ladies at the same time.”

‘I am reading through my Sévigné again—welcome as the flowers of May.’

“I too am taking some medicine, which, whatever effect it has on me, leaves an indelible mark on Mahogany: for (of course) I spilled a lot on my Landlady’s Chiffonier, and found her this morning rubbing at the ‘damned Spot’ with Turpentine, and in vain.”

And two days later:

“I was to have gone home to-day: but Worthington wishes me to stay, at any rate, till the week’s end, by which time he thinks to remove what he calls ‘a Crepitation’ in one lung, by help of the Medicine which proved its power on the mahogany. Yesterday came a Cabinet-maker, who was for more than half an hour employed in returning that to its ‘sound and pristine health,’ or such as I hope my Landlady will be satisfied with.”

‘5 Onslow Gardens, S.W. ‘May 19.

‘Dear mr. FitzGerald,

‘Certainly you are no stranger to me. I have heard so often from Carlyle, and I have read so much in his letters, about your exertions, and about your entertainment of him at various times, that I can hardly persuade myself that I never saw you.

‘The letters you speak of must be very interesting, and I would ask you to let me see them if I thought that they were likely to be of use to me; but the subject with which I have to deal is so vast that I am obliged to limit myself, and so intricate that I am glad to be able to limit myself. I shall do what Carlyle desired me to do, i.e. edit the collection of his wife’s letters, which he himself prepared for publication.

‘This gift or bequest of his governs the rest of my work. What I have already done is an introduction to these letters. When they are published I shall add a volume of personal recollections of his later life; and this will be all. Had I been left unencumbered by special directions I should have been tempted to leave his domestic history untouched except on the outside, and have attempted to make a complete biography out of the general materials. This I am unable to do, and all that I can give the world will be materials for some other person to use hereafter. I can explain no further the conditions of the problem. But for my own share of it I have materials in abundance, and I must avoid being tempted off into other matters however important in themselves.

‘I may add for myself that I did not seek this duty, nor was it welcome to me. C. asked me to undertake it. When I looked through the papers I saw how difficult, how, in some aspects of it, painful, the task would be.

‘Believe me, ‘faithfully yours, ‘J. A. Froude.’

“I have had Sir Walter read to me first of a Night, by way of Drama; then ten minutes for Refreshment, and then Dickens for Farce. Just finished the Pirate—as wearisome for Nornas, Minnas, Brendas, etc., as any of the Scotch Set; but when the Common People have to talk, the Pirates to quarrel and swear, then Author and Reader are at home; and at the end I ‘fare’ to like this one the best of the Series. The Sea scenery has much to do with this preference I dare say.”