Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) Part 35

{54} Cedars, not yew. See Memoirs of Chorley, ii. 240.

{55} In Tales of the Hall, Book XI. ('Works,' vi. 284), quoted from memory.

{56} Virgil, AEn. vi. 127.

{57a} Referring to the well-known print of 'Remarkable Characters who were at Tunbridge Wells with Richardson in 1748.'

{57b} James Spedding.

{59a} In the original draft of Tales of the Hall, Book VI.

{59b} See Memoirs of Chateaubriand, written by himself, Eng. trans. 1849 p. 123. At the Chateau of Combourg in Brittany, 'When supper was over, and the party of four had removed from the table to the chimney, my mother would throw herself, with a sigh, upon an old cotton-covered sofa, and near her was placed a little stand with a light. I sat down by the fire with Lucile; the servants removed the supper-things, and retired. My father then began to walk up and down, and never ceased until his bedtime. He wore a kind of white woollen gown, or rather cloak, such as I have never seen with anyone else. His head, partly bald, was covered with a large white cap, which stood bolt upright. When, in the course of his walk, he got to a distance from the fire, the vast apartment was so ill-lighted by a single candle that he could be no longer seen, he could still be heard marching about in the dark, however, and presently returned slowly towards the light, and emerged by degrees from obscurity, looking like a spectre, with his white robe and cap, and his tall, thin figure.'

{64a} 'The Mighty Magician' and 'Such Stuff as Dreams are made of.'

{64b} See Winter's Tale, iv. 4, 118-120.

{65} 'Euphranor.'

{67} See 'Letters,' ii. 180.

{68} Sir Arthur Helps died March 7th, 1875.

{69} The Pa.s.sage of Carlyle to which FitzGerald refers is perhaps in 'Anti-Dryasdust,' in the Introduction to Cromwell's Letters and Speeches.

'By very nature it is a labyrinth and chaos, this that we call Human History; an _abatis_ of trees and brushwood, a world-wide jungle, at once growing and dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of To-day, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould; others are like the aloe, growths that last a thousand or three thousand years.' Ste. Beuve, in his 'Nouveaux Lundis' (iv. 295), has a similar remark: 'Pour un pet.i.t nombre d'arbres qui s'elevent de quelques pieds au-dessus de terre et qui s'apercoivent de loin, il y a partout, en litterature, de cet humus et de ce detrius vegetal, de ces feuilles acc.u.mulees et enta.s.sees qu'on ne distingue pas, si l'on ne se baisse.' At the end of his copy FitzGerald has referred to this as 'Carlyle's Peat.'

{71} In The Gamester. See 'Macready's Reminiscences,' i. 54-57.

{72a} In Rowe's Tamerlane. See 'Macready's Reminiscences,' i. 202.

{72b} Probably the English Tragedy, which was finished in October 1838.

See 'Records of Later Days,' ii. 168.

{74} In the _Transactions of the New Shakspere Society_ for 1875-76. The surviving editor of the 'Cambridge Shakspeare' does not at all feel that Spedding's criticism 'smashed' the theory which was only put forward as a tentative solution of a perhaps insoluble problem.

{75a} See 'Letters,' ii. 177.

{75b} See 'Letters,' ii. 198, 228, and Boswell's 'Johnson' (ed. Birkbeck Hill), iv. 193.

{77} FitzGerald wrote to me about the same time:

"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."

{78} 'On the Stage,' in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for December 1863 Reprinted as an Introduction to Mrs. Kemble's 'Notes upon some of Shakespeare's Plays.'

{79} See his 'Life and Letters,' p. 46.

{80} In the _Cornhill Magazine_ for July 1875, The Merchant of Venice at the Prince of Wales's Theatre.

{82a} 'The Enterprising Impresario' by Walter Maynard (Thomas Willert Beale), 1867, pp 273-4.

{82b} Beginning, 'A spirit haunts the year's last hours.' It first appeared in the poems of 1830, p. 67, and is now included in Tennyson's Collected Works. See 'Letters,' ii. 256.

{82c} By Sir Gilbert Elliot, father of the first Lord Minto. The query appeared 25 Sept. 1875 ('N. & Q.' 5th Series, iv. 247), and two answers are given at p. 397, but not by E. F.G.

{83} See 'Letters,' ii. 185.

{84} The _Atlantic Monthly_ for August, September, and October 1875.

{85a} _Atlantic Monthly_, August 1875, p. 167, by T. S. Perry.

{85b} _Ibid._, p. 240.

{86} From Oct. 30 to Nov. 4.

{87a} The Trial of Queen Katharine in _Henry VIII_. Charles Kemble acted Cromwell.

{87b} _Atlantic Monthly_, August 1875, p. 165.

{88a} 'The Exile,' quoted from memory.

{88b} See letter of August 24, 1875.

{89} _Atlantic Monthly_, August 1875, p. 156.

{90a} Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. De Quincey's account of him is in his essay on Charles Lamb ('Works,' ed. 1862, viii. 146). His career was the subject of a story by d.i.c.kens, called 'Hunted Down.'

{90b} Minnie Thackeray (Mrs. Leslie Stephen) died Nov. 28.

{91} About the same time he wrote to me:--

'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.'

{92} When I was preparing the first edition of FitzGerald's Letters I wrote to Mrs. Kemble for permission to quote the pa.s.sage from her Gossip which is here referred to. She replied (11 Dec. 1883):--

'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 pa.s.sage 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 ma.s.sive 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 gla.s.s and dead and burnished silver, so exquisite that the splendid gold service was p.r.o.nounced 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; n.o.ble 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 AEschylus, 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 Khayyam, 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 fis.h.i.+ng-smack which Edward Fitzgerald's bounty had set afloat, and in which the translator of Calderon and AEschylus pa.s.sed his time, better pleased with the fellows.h.i.+p and intercourse of the captain and crew of his small fis.h.i.+ng 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."

{94} Mrs. Kemble's letter was written with a typewriter (see 'Further Records,' i. 198, 240, 247). It was given by FitzGerald to Mr. F.

Spalding, now of the Colchester Museum, through whose kindness I am enabled to quote it:--

'YORK FARM, BRANCHTOWN.