Tennyson and His Friends Part 14

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 n.o.ble late poem "Parna.s.sus," with a resemblance which is startling. But while the parallel between "Parna.s.sus" 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? pa.s.s 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 friends.h.i.+p! 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 att.i.tude toward the _Rubaiyat_ 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sion of tears."

"I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two b.u.mpkins 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, d.i.c.kens 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 d.i.c.kens."

(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 att.i.tude is that of a man--his countenance a Jupiter's--perhaps rather too much so."