Letters of Edward FitzGerald Volume I Part 10

We have a housefull of the most delightful children: and if the rain would last, and the gra.s.s grow, all would be well. I think the rain will last: I shall prophesy so when I go down to our early dinner. For it is Sunday: and we dine children and all at one o'clock: and go to afternoon church, and a great tea at six--then a pipe (except for the young ladies)--a stroll--a bit of supper--and to bed. Wake in the morning at five--open the window and read Ecclesiasticus. A proverb says that 'everything is fun in the country.'

My Constable has been greatly admired, and is reckoned quite genuine by our great judge, Mr. Churchyard. Mr. C. paints himself: (not in _body_ colours, as you waggishly insinuate) and nicely too. He understands Gainsborough, Constable, and old Crome. Have you ever seen pictures by the latter? some very fine. He was a Norwich man.

BOULGE HALL, _June_ 19/42.

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

Keep the head of Raffaelle as long as you please. I am glad that one of the three pictures at all events is worth something. I antic.i.p.ated that Morton's friend would spoil them in the carriage: friends always do. Keep them all, like my other pictures, at your house: and make what use of them you please. The head of Dante is, I suppose, the same as the one L.

Hunt shewed us engraved in a book: a theatrical one, I thought. . . .

Have you been to any auction-rooms? I have forgot all about them: and can live very well without pictures. I believe one loses all one's tastes in the country: and one is not the less happy. We have had glorious weather: new pease and young potatoes--fresh milk (how good!) and a cool library to sit in of mornings. . . .

_To F. Tennyson_.

BEDFORD, _August_ 16, 1842.

DEAR TENNYSON,

I have been long hoping for a letter from you: it has come this morning, and repays me for all waiting. While you and Morton write to me about Italy I shall never go to see it. And yet your account of Cicero's villa, I confess, gives me a twinge. But of this I am sure: if I saw all these fine things with the bodily eye, I should but see them as a scene in a play, with the additional annoyance of being bitten with fleas perhaps, and being in a state of transition which is not suitable to me: whereas while you see them, and will represent them to me, I see them through your imagination, and that is better than any light of my own.

This is very true, I a.s.sure you: and you and Morton have given me quite a different view of Italy to what I had before: a much more enchanting one, but not the more likely to seduce me into making the false step of trying to realize it for myself. . . . In the mean time how tired and bored would you be to take one of my travels--a voyage of eight miles from Bedford perhaps--travelled twenty times before--every winding of the river, every church-spire, every country pot house and the quality of its beer, well known. No surprise at all. Nil admirari--I find that old Horace is a good fellow-traveller in England: so is Virgil. It is odd that those fellows living in the land they did live in should have talked so coldly about it. As to Alfred's book, I believe it has sold well: but I have not seen him for a long while, and have had no means of hearing about the matter except from Thompson, who told me that very many copies had been sold at Cambridge, which indeed will be the chief market for them. Neither have I seen any notice of them in print except that in the Examiner; and that seemed so quiet that I scarce supposed it was by Forster. Alfred himself is, I believe, in Kent at present. And now, my dear Frederic, why do you think of returning to England? Depend upon it you are better off as you are. You will never turn magistrate nor bean- dibbler, nor make yourself of use in the country, and therefore why should you not live where you like to live best? When I read of your laughing and singing and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying beakers full of the warm South I am sure you had best stay where you are.

I should indeed be very glad to see you again: but then I should miss hearing from you: and you would only come here to abuse us all and go back again. You Tennysons are born for warm climates. As to poor England, I never see a paper, but I think with you that she is on the go.

I used to dread this: but somehow I now contemplate it as a necessary thing, and, till the shoe begins to pinch me sorely, walk on with some indifference. It seems impossible the manufacturers can go on as they are: and impossible that the demand for our goods can continue as of old in Europe: and impossible but that we must get a rub and licking in some of our colonies: and if all these things come at once, why then the devil's in it. I used to think as you do about France and the French: and we all agreed in London that France should be divided among the other powers as Poland was: but Donne has given me pause: he says that France is the great counteracting democratic principle to Russia. This may be: though I think Russia is too unwieldly and rotten-ripe ever to make a huge progress in conquest. What is to be thought of a nation where the upper cla.s.ses speak the language of another country, and have varnished over their honest barbarism with the poorest French profligacy and intrigue? Russia does not seem a whole to me. In the mean time, all goes on toward better and better, as is my firm belief: and humanity grows clear by flowing, (very little profited by any single sage or hero), and man shall have wings to fly and something much better than that in the end. . . .

I draw a very little, and think of music as I walk in the fields: but have no piano in this part of the world. . . . I hear there is a fine new Symphony by Mendelssohn, who is by far our best writer now, and in some measure combines Beethoven and Handel. I grow every day more and more to love only the old G.o.d save the King style: the common chords, those truisms of music, like other truisms so little understood in the full. Just look at the mechanism of Robin Adair.

Now pray write to me again when you can. You don't know how much I rejoice in your letters.

_To S. Laurence_.

BEDFORD, _Thursday_, [_August_, 1842.]

DEAR LAURENCE,

. . . I have heard from Morton and F. Tennyson; the letter of the latter very descriptive and fine. He is summering at Castellamare, and Morton at Sorrento. What must Italy be if we are complaining of heat here!

I have just been naming all Mr. Browne's pictures for him. This he has insisted on for three years, and at last this very hot day after an early dinner pens and paper were brought out and I have been writing down awful calumnies about Cuyp, Both, etc. Who could have painted Catharine of Medicis, do you know? We are afraid to call it Vand.y.k.e, as he lived (I believe) a century after her: and Mr. B. won't give up its being Catharine's portrait. So here we are in a fix. I went to see Lord Northampton's place Castle Ashby a week ago: expected pictures, and saw very bad ones. The house is very handsome, built by Inigo Jones.

I weigh 14 stone--fact.

_To John Allen_.

[KEYSOE, _August_ 1842.]

MY DEAR JOHN ALLEN,

. . . I am much _entete_ at present about one Matthews, {122} a preacher at Bedford, who would do very well for Manchester in opposition to Chartists, etc. If you are here on a Friday or a Sunday go and hear him.

I would gladly subscribe to remove him from Bedford. All this you will think absurd; and so perhaps it is.

I have been reading Stobaeus' Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose. The bits of Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable. And this is really all I have looked at all this summer.

BEDFORD, _August_ 29/42.

MY DEAREST FELLOW,

Your letter reached me this morning and gave me much pleasure. An old acquaintance is not the worse for its wear, I think. This very time ten years ago we were in Wales together: I at Mr. Rees' boarding-house at Tenby: and there I made chance acquaintance with the whiskered man {123} at whose house I am now staying:--then a boy of sixteen. He is now a man of business, of town-politics, and more intent on the first of September than on anything else in the world. I see very little of him. . . .

I occasionally read sentences about the Virtues out of this collection of Stobaeus, and look into Sartor Resartus, which has fine things in it: and a little Dante and a little Shakespeare. But the great secret of all is the not eating meat. To that the world must come, I am sure. Only it makes one gra.s.shopper foolish. I also receive letters from Morton and F.

Tennyson full of fine accounts of Italy, finer than any I ever read. They came all of a sudden on Cicero's villa--one of them at least, the Formian--with a mosaic pavement leading thro' lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain as old as the Augustan age bubbling up as fresh, Tennyson says, 'as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator as he sate there in the stillness of the noon day, devoting the siesta-hours to study.' When I first read of these things I wish to see them; but, on reflection, I am sure I see them much better in such letters as these.

I have seen one good picture about here: a portrait of O. Cromwell by Lely--so said--unlike other Lelys, but very carefully painted: and, I should think, an original portrait. . . I also read Hayley's Life of Romney the other day. Romney wanted but education and reading to make him a very fine painter: but his ideal was not high nor fixed. How touching is the close of his life! He married at nineteen, and, because Sir Joshua and others had said that marriage spoilt an artist, almost immediately left his wife in the North, and scarce saw her till the end of his life: when, old, nearly mad, and quite desolate, he went back to her, and she received him, and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney's pictures; even as a matter of Art, I am sure.

Whether this letter will ever reach you, I don't know. I am going in two days to Naseby for a little while, and shall then find my way home to Suffolk for the greater part of the Winter and Spring, I suppose.

O beate Sesti, Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inch.o.a.re longam.

I think of hiring a house in some country town like this, but nearer Suffolk, and there have my books, etc. I want a house much: and a very small one will content me, with a few old women close by to play cards with at night. What a life, you will say!

His virtues walked then humble round, Nor knew a pause, nor felt a void: And sure the Eternal Master found His single talent well employ'd.

That was not in playing picquet, I doubt. What fine lines of Johnson's {125} these!

On the 15th of September 1842 FitzGerald first made Carlyle's personal acquaintance. He always spoke of his having first gone to Chelsea in company with Thackeray, and in the Notes which he left of his excavations at Naseby he repeats what he frequently told myself and others. But his memory was clearly at fault, for in a letter to Pollock, written on the 16th, but dated by mistake the 17th, of September, he says, 'I have come up to London for two days on a false errand: and am therefore going back in a pet, to Naseby. . . . I enquired at Spedding's rooms to-day: he is expected by the 20th, which is near. Laurence is the only person I know in town. . . . He and I went to see Carlyle at Chelsea yesterday. That genius has been surveying the field of battle of Naseby in company with Dr. Arnold, who died soon after, poor man! I doubt (from Carlyle's description) if they identified the very ground of the carnage. . . . I have heard nothing of Thackeray for these two months. He was to have visited an Irish brother of mine: but he has not yet done so. I called at Coram Street yesterday, and old John seemed to think he was yet in Ireland.' With this correction I now give the Memorandum referred to, which FitzGerald entrusted to my keeping together with several of Carlyle's letters. An attempt to put up a monument on the real site of the battle proved abortive, as will appear hereafter.

'About the middle of September 1842, W. M. Thackeray took me to tea with Carlyle whom I had not previously known. He was then busy with Cromwell; had just been, he told us, over the Field of Naseby in company with Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and had sufficiently identified the Ground of the Battle with the contemporaneous Accounts of it. As I happened to know the Field well--the greater part of it then belonging to my Family--I knew that Carlyle and Arnold had been mistaken--misled in part by an Obelisk which my Father had set up as on the highest Ground of the Field, but which they mistook for the centre-ground of the Battle. This I told Carlyle, who was very reluctant to believe that he and Arnold could have been deceived--that he could accept no hearsay Tradition or Theory against the Evidence of his own Eyes, etc.

However, as I was just then going down to Naseby, I might enquire further into the matter.

'On arriving at Naseby, I had spade and mattock taken to a hill near half a mile across from the "Blockhead Obelisk," and pitted with several hollows, overgrown with rank Vegetation, which Tradition had always pointed to as the Graves of the Slain. One of these I had opened; and there, sure enough, were the remains of Skeletons closely packed together--chiefly teeth--but some remains of s.h.i.+nbone, and marks of Skull in the Clay. Some of these, together with some sketches of the Place, I sent to Carlyle.

'The Naseby Monument, already advised by Carlyle, was not executed at the time: and some how or other was not again talked of till 1855 when the Estate was to be sold from us. I was told however by the Lawyers, etc., that it was better not to interfere while that Business was going on. So the Scheme went to sleep again till 1872, when, Carlyle renewing the subject in some Letter, I applied to the Agent of the Estate who was willing to help us in getting permission to erect the Stone, and to a neighbouring Mason to fas.h.i.+on it as Carlyle desired.

We had some difficulty in this latter point, but at last all was settled, when suddenly Agent and Lawyer informed us the thing must not be done--for one reason, that Stone and Inscription were considered too plain.'

Before the excavations were begun, however, FitzGerald received the following letter of instructions from Carlyle, written three days after their interview.

CHELSEA, 18 _Sept_., 1842.

MY DEAR SIR,

Profiting by the unexpected fact that _you_ are now master of Naseby Battlefield, I have gone over the whole matter once more, probably for the twentieth time; I have copied you my illegible pencil-notes, and re- verified everything,--that so, if you can understand the meaning (which will be difficult, I fear), you may append to it what commentary, collected on the spot, you may judge edifying. Let me, however, again impress upon you that these statements and descriptions are actual _facts_, gathered with industry from some seven or eight eyewitnesses, looking at the business with their own eyes from seven or eight different sides; that the present figure of the ground, in my recollection, corresponds very tolerably well with the whole of them;--and that no 'theory,' by what Professor soever, can be of any use to me in comparison. I wish you had Sprigge's complete Plan of the Battle: but you have it not; you have only that foolish Parson's {128} very dim copy of it, and must help yourself with that.

The things I wish you to give me are first: The whole story of your Blacksmith, or other oral Chronicler, be it wise and credible, be it absurd and evidently false. Then you can ask, whether there remains any tradition of a windmill at Naseby? One stands in the Plan, not far from North of the village, probably some 300 yards to the west of where the a.s.s of a column now stands: the whole concern, of fighting, rallying, flying, killing and chasing, transacted itself to the _west_ of that,--on the height, over the brow of the height, down the slope, in the hollow, and up again to the grounds of Dust Hill, where the _final_ dispersion took place. Therefore, again, pray ask.

Where precisely any dead bodies are known to have been found? Where and when the _last_-found was come upon; what they made of it,--whether no Antiquarian kept a tooth; at any rate, a b.u.t.ton or the like? Cannon-b.a.l.l.s ought to be found, especially musket-b.a.l.l.s, down in that hollow, and on the slope thitherward: is any extant cabinet master of one?

Farther, are there, on the high ground N.W. or W. of Naseby village, any traces still discoverable of such names as these: 'Lantford hedges' (or perhaps 'hedge'); a kind of thicket running _up_ the slope, towards the western environs of Naseby village, nearly from the North;--Fairfax had dragoons hidden here, who fired upon Rupert's right, as he charged upwards: 'Rutput Hill': 'f.a.n.n.y Hill' (according to Rushworth, 'Famny Hill' in Sprigge),--probably two swellings in the ground, that lie between the south end of Lantford Hedges and the village; 'Lean Leaf Hill' seemingly another swelling, parallel to these, which reaches in with its slope _to_ the very village--from the west: 'Mill Hill' farther to the east (marked as due west from the windmill, which of course must have stood upon a part of it), lying therefore upon the north part of the village? Is it possible, in spite of all ditching and enclosure bills, there may still some vestige of these names adhere to some fields or messuages; the exact position of which it would be satisfactory to fix.

You can also tell me whether Burrough Hill is visible from Naseby, and 'what it is like'; and what the Sibbertoft height, on the other side, and the Harboro' Height are like! I suppose one sees Sibbertoft steeple, but no houses, from Naseby Height? Also that it was undoubtedly Clipston (as the good Dr. Arnold and I supposed) that we saw there. Dr. A. and I came, as I find, thro' Crick, West Hadden, Cold Ashby; and crossed the Welford and Northampton road, perhaps some three miles from Naseby.

On the whole, my dear Sir, here seems to be work enough for you! But after all is it not worth your while on other accounts? Were it not a most legitimate task for the Proprietor of Naseby, a man of scholars.h.i.+p, intelligence and leisure, to make himself completely acquainted with the true state of all details connected with Naseby Battle and its localities? Few spots of ground in all the world are memorabler to an Englishman. We could still very well stand a good little book on Naseby!

_Verb.u.m sapienti_.