1 Cornell University § Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013344530 Gdwaed fitzgbeald. The interest inspired by the name of Edward FitzGerald is not merely an interest in the translator of the Eubiiydt of Omar Khayyam. Still less is it merely an interest in the literary critic of the Letters. The translation, after all, is only a triumphant accident, and the criticism, though full of charm, is little more than a record of unrelated preferences and aversions. The real interest, therefore, is in something that FitzGerald stood for : it is an interest in a frame of mind, a point of view, and a way of getting through life. "FitzGerald," people may be heard to say, "is one of ' my men ' "_; and inquiry is apt to elicit the fact that the other "men" with whom he is thus classed are S^nancour, Amiel, and Lafcadio Hearn. Not that the four men are four replicas of the same model ; no four men are ever that. Senancour consumed far less of his own smoke than FitzGerald did; Amiel, as a university professor, occupied a more specific field of usefulness; Lafcadio Hearn was a more enterprising traveller, and favoured a more tropical system of morality. These are obvious distinctions, perfectly easy to draw; but when they have been drawn, the fundamental resemblances remain. The typical hard, ambitious, energetic, successful man would say of every one of the writers enumerated that they "lacked backbone," and that, in point of fact, they were "wasters." So they were. The fact leaps to the eyes, and there is nothing to be gained by denying it. We may say if we like — we can say quite truly — that they were no ordinary wasters. We may add if we like — and if our temperament allows us — that wasting was in their case justified by results. But wasters, from the point of view of the strenuous, they indubitably were. They all, in the measure of their opportunities, evaded life, and looked on at it instead of living; they all, in the end, found the contemplation rather a melancholy business ; they all consoled themselves as best they could by making their melan- choly melodious. That is the common note tempting moralists to moralise, as they have done, and do. FitzGerald was the most musical, if not the most mournful, of the four; the music in his case was concentrated, whereas the melancholy was distributed and spun out, and never, so far as one can see, intense. He was also, being a man of sufficient X X 2 648 EDWARD FITZGERALD. private means, the most successful of the four in what Mr. A. C. Benson has called "malingering." It is hardly an exaggera- tion to say that he malingered from the cradle to the grave. That is the reason why he has so often been pitied and patronised, and despised and censured, and told alternately that he wanted "faith" and that he wanted "a job"; but that is also the reason why so many hearts have gone out to him with sympathetic envy. Not all hearts, of course. There are plenty of critics of life who say quite bluntly that they cannot stand that sort of thing and that sort of man at any price. The stupid people say so, almost with one accord. In FitzGerald's place, it seems to them, they would have "put in the time somehow" — yachting, and riding to hounds, and playing cards, and making love to the girls — and been perfectly happy and contented. The strenuous people — a certain sort of strenuous people — say the same. The German Emperor, one feels sure, would say so. So would ex-President Eoosevelt and the Bishop of London. So would Lord Roberts and General Booth and Mr. Stead. "What is all this maundering about?" they would ask. "Why can't the man be up and doing? " That is the normal and natural attitude towards the waster of the strenuous people who are strenuous by choice and thoroughly satisfied with themselves, or thoroughly satisfied, at all events, that the things which they are doing are the things which it is most worth while to do. There is no answer to their rhetorical questions which they would be capable of understanding. One may agree with them, or one may leave them wrapped up in their virtue ; but one cannot argue with them. FitzGerald is not one of their "men," and cannot be ; there is no more to be said. Whose "man," then, is he? And to whom does he appeal? He appeals chiefly, as far as one can observe, to the strenuous people of another class : the people who are strenuous under the compulsion of necessity, but who, though overworked, sometimes sit down and take synoptic views of their lives, raising the question whether they have not, after all, mistaken movement for life — whether they are not, in Gorki's phrase, "prisoners of life," turning the crank or working the treadmill to no very obvious advantage — whether it has not been their fate, in the phrase of an older writer than Gorki, propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. Gorki knows the attitude well, and has illustrated it in the history of Grigori Orloif, the cobbler. Grigori awoke one day to self-consciousness and discovered that his life was revolving in a vicious circle. He was making boots to live — but he was BDWABD FITZGERALD. 649 only living to make boots. "What," he asked pertinently, "is the sense of that? " What, indeed? That is another of the questions which it is impossible to answer to the satisfaction of those who ask them ; and the world is full of people, by no means all of them cobblers, whom Grigori's problem puzzles. It is specially apt to puzzle a thoughtful man who sits at a desk committed to a mechanical or trivial occupation. Such a man may, at first, have plunged into his occupation with ardour, attracted by the novelty, and full of joy in the energetic exertion of his faculties. The crisis comes when the novelty has worn off and the energy has matured into fatigue. The sensation then steals over him that the keeping of accounts, or the drafting of deeds, or the selling of sugar, or the sub- editing of a newspaper, or whatever it may be, is by no means an end in itself. He feels that his employment has, so to say, manoeuvred him into a corner from which life as a whole is hardly visible, and filled his mind with sordid thoughts which hamper his meditations on the matters of permanent concern. The real life, he gets to think, is the contemplative life which brings a man face to face with his own soul. Porbidden by circumstances to live such a life himself, he likes to live it in imagination in the lives of others. Matthew Arnold turned in such a mood from the dreary round of an inspector of schools to contemplate with an almost jealous sympathy the unsuc- cessful spiritual adventures of Senancour. Modern men, in the same mood, turn with the same envious and sympathetic interest to the spiritual adventures of FitzGerald — sometimes to the delightful letters which depict the details, sometimes to the supreme poem which sums up the conclusion of the matter. The melancholy of the atmosphere does not repel them. It is not only a melodious, but a remote and restful melancholy, due to no tangible and specific cause, and harmonising with the mood of the man who is tired of what seem to him laborious futilities. It does not depress, but soothes; and it leaves those whom it allures with the feeling that, after all, it is better to be melancholy after FitzGerald's fashion than profitlessly strenuous after their own. Probably, too, in virtue of their underlying strenuousness, they feel that they would not, in his circumstances, be quite as melancholy as he was : that they could make something of such a life as his, whereas of the life of a bank clerk, or a conveyancer, or a reporter, or a sub-editor, or what not, there is, in the spiritual sense, nothing whatever to be made. That, in all probability, is the mood which accounts for the 650 EDWABD FITZGERALD. FitzGerald cult ; that is the true inwardness of the confession : "FitzG-erald is one of my men." It is, at bottom, a hankering after leisure : a desire to reach some standpoint from which one can see life steadily and see it whole, and take quiet counsel with oneself while watching the panorama pass, and make up one's mind, without being hustled, whether all is vanity or not. Whether that desire is increased as one gains a closer acquaintance with the details of FitzGerald 's life is, of course, another question — the answer to which depends upon the importance which one assigns to details. For certainly the details, as collected and presented by Mr. Thomas Wright, and graphically repeated by Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson, are not only unedifying from the point of view of the moralist, but also grotesque from the point of view of the man of the world ; and the picture which results from them is not that of a sage walking "with inward glory crowned," but rather that of a flabby man, degenerating into a harmless eccentric, and with little to say at the end of his eccentric pilgrimage except the equivalent in his own nobler language of : La farce est jouee ; tirez les rideaux : — And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass Among the Guests Star-scattered on the Grass, And in your joyous errand reach the spot Where I made One — turn down an empty glass. One need not moralise, however. It is sufficient to state facts ; and the principal fact to be stated is that the life of FitzGerald is an object-lesson in paralysis of the will — interest- ing chiefly because the will paralysed was that of a man of genius. He made nothing of his life because he never tried ; he never tried because it never seemed worth while to try. He went on doing nothing for decades because no one thing ever seemed better worth doing than another. The ass of Buridan starving between two equal bundles of equally attractive hay is his true analogue ; and so, the time passing — but we will come to that presently. A parallel between FitzGerald and Alfred de Musset may seem absurd. The Frenchman was habitually drunk, and the Englishman habitually sober ; the Englishman's vices were as rare as the Frenchman's virtues ; between the George Sand story and the Lucy Barton story a great gulf — the greatest imaginable^is fixed. Etcetera ; the parallel falling to pieces at almost every point at which one tests it. Yet Musset, in his cynical youth, uttered the sentence which might have been FitzGerald 's guiding maxim. He was called upon to choose his EDWARD FITZGERALD. 651 profession — to decide whether he would be a lawyer or a doctor— and he declined to be either. Man,' he told his puzzled family, was such a poor insignificant creature that really it was not worth while to take pains to fashion oneself into "a particular kind of man." Perhaps it is an immoral saying, especially for a young man in his teens ; but here again we need not moralise. It is per- fectly easy for those of us who look at life as a whole, and have not arrived at being Emperors or Presidents or bishops, to argue ourselves into the frame of mind in which it does seem rather ridiculous to sacrifice the gratifications of the moment and incur a vast amount of trouble merely in order to become, at the end of it all, say, a solicitor, or an actuary, or a borough surveyor, or a chartered accountant. For really, when one comes to think of it, the life of a solicitor or an actuary— but never mind. FitzGerald evidently, like Musset, took that view of the matter, though he was less self-conscious about it. To him, as to Musset, it seemed not worth while to be definite on purpose; though both of them, by trusting to accident and leaving things to take their course, became in the fulness of time very definite — the one very definitely an inebriate, and the other very definitely, as Mr. Benson puts it, "sloppy." FitzGerald was not even definitely a recluse or definitely, to repeat the inevitable word, a "waster." The definite recluse is either a man like Wordsworth, who seeks seclusion for the profit of his soul and the fruition of his powers, or else he is a man like Beckford, who has lost his illusions and measured the value of the pomps and vanities and pleasures of the world. The definite waster is either a man who objects to work because it interferes with play, or else he is a man who considers that his vices have the first claim upon his time. FitzGerald cannot be placed in any of these categories. His literary ambitions were only those of a dilettante, and he never warmed both hands before the fire of life; at the most he only lingered irresolutely warming his back at it. Games did not attract him, and no vice had any hold on him. He was a very moderate drinker, and no one has contradicted his statement that he was "tolerably chaste, &c." His chastity and temperance, indeed, are important facts to bear in mind. They differentiate him from King Solomon and confute the common view that disillusion is the punishment for dissipation. When the Preacher said that all was vanity and vexation of spirit, he spoke with the authority of one who had tried and found it so. The special pathos of FitzGerald's case lies in the fact that he reached the Preacher's conclusions 652 EDWARD FITZGERALD. without enjoying the Preacher's experiences. He had not the strength to "sin strongly"; he had not even the strength, as we shall see, to "behave badly." He lived from hand to mouth, from day to day, never indulging in excesses, never tempted to them, defending his "visionary inactivity" as preferable to the "mischievous activity" of certain other people — his brother John, the revivalist missionary, for instance. It seemed all right. His life was harmless, and was sustained by many friendships. More than one man wrote of him as their dearest and most valued friend. He was persuaded — though he was never quite exultant about it — that all was well with him. "Here I live," he wrote to Archdeacon Allen, "with tolerable content : perhaps with as much as most people arrive at, and what if one were properly grateful one would perhaps call perfect happiness." And then again : "such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it." Decidedly it seemed all right ; but, somehow or other, it was not. Time passed. Friends died or went about their own business , absorbed in their own interests. Contentment slipped away by imperceptible degrees. There had been no single harrowing catastrophe — no such catastrophe as a stronger man would not have lived down and forgotten ; but FitzGerald found himself, none the less, of the Preacher's opinion. He had not, like the Preacher, tried life and found it wanting ; he had suffered from the first from the moral disease which the French call impuissance de virre, and he knew it. Nothing was worth while because nothing had ever been worth while. Contempla- tion had not even gained him a philosophy. Nothing remained but to make the confession, throwing up the sponge, as it were, to slow, majestic music. For that, after all, is what the translation of the Eubaiyat amounts to. Omar Khayyam himself may have been a Sufi, a symbolist, a mystic, or anything else that Persian scholars like to tell us that he was. FitzG-erald, it is quite certain, was nothing of the kind. When he speaks of wine he means wine, and cannot possibly be taken to mean the love of God. The translation was merely his chance of speaking out without doing violence to the instinct which forbids most Englishmen to draw pointed attention to the secrets of their souls. He spoke out, but only to confess, in effect, that he had nothing in particular to say — nothing, at any rate, that had not been said before him by the frivolous as well as the grave. The philosophy, if one may use the word, of the Eubaiyat, is not only the philo- sophy of the Preacher already referred to. It is also the philosophy of tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. It is also the EDWARD FITZGERALD. 653 philosophy of "Come, landlord, fill the flowing bowl" and of "Wrap me up in my old stable- jacket." In the last-named case, indeed, the parallel is almost ludicrously close. "So get you," runs the song : — So get you six brandies and sodas. And set thena all out in a row, And fetch you six jolly good fellows To drink to the buffer below. And what is that but a ribald variant on : — Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide, And wash the body whence the Life has died. And lay me, shrouded in the living Leaf, By some not unfrequented Garden-side. That ev'n my buried Ashes such a snare Of Vintage shall fling up into the Air As not a True-believer passing by. But shall be overtaken unaware. The difference of tone and expression between the two passages is, of course, immeasurably wide; but the fundamental thought underlying them is practically identical. There could be no more convincing evidence of the truth of Tennyson's rule for poets : that it makes very little difference what we say, but a great deal of difference how we say it. FitzGerald said what he had to say supremely well ; but he had little to say except Garpe diem and Invalidasque tibi tendens heu ! non tua palmas. Perhaps it is because so many of the strenuous livers find, after all their strenuousness, that they can say no more with confident conviction, that FitzGerald' s poem makes such a wide and deep appeal. Speaking for himself, he voiced, with the sorrowful dignity of one inspired, a wider scepticism — a more far-reaching Epicureanism — than he knew ; and the world was more grateful for that than it ever is, in our own generation, for new and original ideas. In its gratitude it forgives FitzGerald for much. It forgives him not only for being "flabby," but also for being grotesque. It not only forgives, but forgets. It forgets not only to censure but to laugh — though, in truth, one might find a good deal to laugh at, if one were in the mood, and if laughter were not lost in pity. The Lucy Barton story is very pitiful ; but it is also rather comic. She was a Quaker's daughter, who had joined the Church of England, as a means, one imagines, of climbing the social ladder ; and she was just the sort of person whom FitzGerald would esteem, but detest : prim, pious, methodical, fussy, not quite a 654 EDWAED FITZGERALD. lady, and yet, in a weird provincial way, worldly — the sort of person to whom it seems equally important to teach in the Sunday school and to be a leader of society. PitzGerald and she had known each other f or the -greater part-of - tbe-if-ltcea, and were both nearly fifty years of age when marriage overtook them. He did not even know that he was engaged to her ; but she told him that he was, and he was too polite to contradict her. Politeness only broke down when, after the ceremony, she assumed pro- prietorial airs, and insisted that her husband should pay afternoon calls with her and dress for dinner. That was the last straw — though very likely it was also the first. FitzG-erald supposed apparently that, in marrying Lucy Barton, he had merely acquired a housekeeper who would know her place — who would confine her new dignity to her housekeeper's room, leaving him as free as of old to slop about in slippered ease, unkempt, unshaven, enveloped in a dressing-gown until the even- ing, with books all over the floor, pipes all over the mantelpiece, and tobacco ash all over his clothes. It would not have mattered, of course, if he had married for love, and if his bride had been a woman of grace and charm. Such a one would have changed all that like a fairy waving a magic wand. But FitzGerald had only married "to oblige"; and Mrs. FitzGerald was not in the least like a fairy. She was more like a female drill sergeant, con- ventional, stiff, and starched — yet with pretensions. Her flow of fussy small talk was a nuisance ; and her interruption of Fitz- Gerald's meditations with the demand that he should shave and wear clean linen assumed the proportion of a tragedy in his eyes. He stood it for a fortnight, and then fled, leaving the honeymoon unfinished, going off to stay with friends, bolting like a rabbit for its burrow. There was a reunion, and an attempt at reconciliation, but it was vain. FitzGerald 's letters to his friends at this period are like the letters home of a boy who is being bullied at school. "I believe," he writes to Professor Cowell, "there are new channels fretted in my cheeks with many unmanly tears " ; and there really is no evidence that he had anything to cry about beyond the fact that he was being hustled out of a comfortable dressing- gown into a starched shirt with high collars. Only, of course, that fact was symbolical of the general discrepancy of tastes and points of view. So we find him writing again : "Till I see better how we get on, I dare fix on no place to live or die in" ; and then, before long, came definite separation and the drafting of a deed of settlement. FitzGerald, it is said, used long afterwards to walk up and down a certain garden path for hours together cursing his fate, and calling himself a fool; and when, in later EDWARD FITZGERALD. 655 years, he met his wife again, he first put out his hand, and then changed his mind and turned his back. "Come along, Posh ! " he said to his friend the fisherman, and walked away. That is all ; and though the tragedy was doubtless poignant to FitzG-erald, there is no denying that it has its ludicrous side for the spectator 61 his misfortunes. The snare was set so con- spicuously in his sight ; he stumbled into it so very awkwardly ; he was so surprised and shocked — and he cried out so shrilly — when the sharp teeth of conventional obligations closed upon him with a snap. If there had been the dignity of a great passion and a great betrayal, one would envisage the matter differently ; but there is nothing of the kind. There is merely the tragedy of the Ass of Buridan, breaking its habit for once, and making a definite choice — or seeming to do so — regretting it as soon as made, and maundering over it for evermore. And the rest of FitzGerald's life is also, in its sad way, comic. Or, at all events, he himself becomes, in his sad way, an in- creasingly comic figure. "What blunders one has to look back upon, to be sure ! " he writes ; but he never tries to repair them. No passion comes to his rescue, no "settled plan of interest"; no religion, no philosophy, no sustained intellectual action. A clergyman, in his crude way, tried to persuade him to seek consolation in churchgoing ; but he "retired hurt" from the encounter. FitzGerald told him that he had "reflected fully" on these matters, and added, "You need not repeat this visit." Meanwhile, as Mr. Benson says, "he lived as best he might," cultivating his famous friendship for the fisherman "Posh," with whom he made acquaintance on the beach at Lowestoft. It is said that he induced Posh to sign the pledge, and that Posh broke the pledge rather ostentatiously, and refused to sign it again. It is also said that Posh was allowed to sleep off the stultifying effects of Scotch ale on FitzGerald's sofa. All sorts of things are said — things, some of them, to which one might have expected a smart solicitor to advise Posh to retort with libel actions ; but the essence of the matter seems to be that FitzGerald made himself rather foolish about Posh, his letters to whom strike an odd and hardly warrantable note of hero worship. The rest of the story is a story of eccentricity — partly eccentricity of behaviour, but mainly eccentricity of costume. FitzGerald could at times be rude. The story, just told, of his rudeness to the clergyman is only one story among many. The story of his rudeness to Mr. Eead, the Woodbridge bookseller, is worse. He invited the bookseller to dinner, and, when the bookseller arrived to keep his engagement, he refused to let him in. "I saw you when you called yesterday," he wrote to his 656 EDWARD FITZGERALD. guest on the following morning, "but I felt that I could not be bothered." That sort of thing — and there were a good many other examples of it — cannot have helped FitzGerald to be popu- lar. Only one excuse could be admitted for it, and that excuse the neighbours applied. FitzGerald, they said in their own vernacular, was "dotty." He certainly must have seemed so to any stranger who observed him, whether in his own home or when he walked abroad. His trousers, we are told, were of baggy blue cloth, and were always too short, displaying stockings which were white as long as they were clean ; in hot weather he took off his boots and carried them over his shoulder, slung from a stick, while in cold weather he trailed rather than carried a green plaid shawl. His high stand- up collars were always crumpled, and the bow of his large tie was apt to come undone. He strode along "with a remote, almost a haughty air, as though he guarded his own secret " ; but his headgear was a weather-beaten and antique top-hat, with a black band round it, secured in its place by a handkerchief. Such was FitzGerald out of doors — a sage who decidedly did not walk crowned with any outward glory. Within doors his appearance must have been, if possible, even more grotesque. He was bald, unshaven, sallow cheeked, with thin, straggling whiskers. He did not trouble to make his toilet, but sat all day in his dressing-gown — that dressing-gown which Mrs. FitzGerald had considered unsuitable afternoon or evening wear for a man in his position — lounging on a low chair with his feet in the fender. Together with his dressing-gown he always wore his hat — that ancient and battered silk hat with the black band round it. When he removed it, it was only for the purpose of getting a red silk handkerchief which he kept stored in its recesses. That is the picture — the ludicrous and saddening picture of a baffled, futile man whom life has worn down rather than defeated, who has lived cleanly but ineffectively, who has not gone forth to look for pessimism, but has simply sat still until pessimism has come to him. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry at it ; and perhaps the enthusiasts who stolidly refuse to do either are in the right. For, after all, FitzGerald wrote his poem. It is the supreme and therefore indispensable expression of a mood that steals over all of us at certain hours ; and it is impossible for anyone to say that any one of the grotesque conditions enumerated were not essential to the writing of it. Certainly it could not have been written by any of the strenuous men whose strenuousness has been contrasted in this essay with FitzGerald 's futility — by the German Emperor, for instance, or ex-President Roosevelt, or the EDWARD FITZGERALD. 657 Bishop of Loncton, or by General Booth or Mr. Stead. Such people could not write such a poem if they would, and would not if they could ; the mere suggestion provokes the mockery of the ribald. The achievement was only to be compassed by a futile man to whom futility was second nature , and the oddities of such a man's costume may well have been of the essence of his futility, or, at all events, the symbol by which he expressed to himself his contempt for the strenuous people who spend their time fuss- ing and fuming over transitory things. A costume consisting of a battered silk hat and a dressing-gown must have served that symbolical purpose admirably ; for a man so attired could not help feeling very futile indeed, and quite incapable of being imposed upon by any illusions whatsoever. Consequently it is quite credible, though not actually demon- strable, that, if FitzG-erald had not worn his battered top-hat with his dressing-gown, the world would have lost his translation of the Rubaiydt. And, if so, no matter — or rather well and good. A well- groomed man more or less makes little difference to the world. Piccadilly is full of such, and they are as much alike as peas in a pod. But a poem more or less, if it be such a poem as Fitz- Gerald's, makes a vast difference to those of us who care for poetry ; and we should be absurdly inconsistent if we were either to grieve or to guffaw because the poet lived the life which made the poem possible. Francis Gribble. PEESIDENT EOOSEVELT'S BECOED. It was certain from the first moment of his accession, when little else was certain, that Mr. Eoosevelt would not prove a President of the McKinley type. It would, indeed, he difficult to imagine two men wider apart in policy, in political methods and standards, and, above all, in personality, than Mr. McKinley and his successor. The American Presidency is an intensely human office, dependent for its influence at least as much on the man who occupies it as on its constitutional prerogatives. His character and disposition , his instinctive ways of looking at things and of managing men, count in the long run for more than his opinions. Every President is largely the prisoner of the Con- stitution, and the degree of freedom he is able to wrest depends rather on personality than prescription. The delicate adjust- ments, the nice equipoises, the triple system of balances involved in the American form of government, the potential friction which it generates, the limitations which for the positive work of legisla- tion make the President far less effective than the British Premier, the temptation which he can hardly resist to subordinate everything to the attainment of "harmony" by a judicious humouring of the Bosses or by allowing the Senate to distribute his patronage for him — form together a situation in which the Presidential ego is and must be the determining factor. Mr. McKinley 's conception of his office and its duties were such as sprang inevitably from his persuasive, mobile, accordant tem- perament. It came natural to him to regard the Presidency as a sort of conduit-pipe between Congress and the electorate, and to dissociate it from any idea of leadership. He accepted fully and heartily the doctrine that the President should follow, and not attempt to guide, public opinion. Great things happened during his Presidency, but he can hardly be said to have presided over them. At best they always seemed to flow through him as through a funnel. His mind and disposition were altogether of the kind that asks for guidance, and, when the oracles differ, tries hard to "solder close impossibilities and make them kiss," and is willing to wait in patience for the unmistakable cue. Under his direction, it is true, the wishes of the people got themselves translated into legislation with unexampled despatch, the capital was at peace, and the wheels of government ran with an ease unknown since Washington's first term of office. But it was a smoothness purchased at the cost of many dubious Cornell University Library PR 4703.G84 Edward FitzGerald. 3 1924 013 344 530