EDWARD FITZGERALD.*

THE first of these three volumes is devoted to Mr. Fitzgerald's

letters. These are some hundreds in number, and range over a period of more than fifty years, the earliest being dated July, 1832, and the latest, written about thirty-six hours before his death, June 12th, 1883. The editor has joined them together with a slender—indeed, a very slender—thread of narrative. No one can find fault with the practice of letting a man tell his own story; nor would any one have wished to have a formal biography of Edward Fitzgerald. He would himself have abhorred the thought. But Mr. Wright has either put in too much of the letters, or has given too little explanation in his narrative. We find, for instance, Mr. Fitzgerald complaining several times of the difficulty that he finds in raising money on reversion. Now, we have not the least wish to be told about the circum- stances which rendered this step necessary. But if the editor is right in withholding all explanation, he should surely have omitted the passages, which possess no sort of value or, failing any knowledge of the circumstances, of interest, but may certainly suggest injurious thoughts. Then we get tantalising glimpses of a certain speculation with a fishing-boat. All that we see is wholly to the honour of Mr.

Fitzgerald and of the sturdy seaman whom he employed, and in whose praises he is most emphatic. Could we not have been told something more about this affair? Apart from this, Mr. Wright has done his work well, as, indeed, he could not fail to do. When any literary allusion requires explanation, the explanation is sure to be forthcoming.

The interest of the letters is great and varied. First, we have little touches of description, sometimes graphic in the highest degree. Here is a little picture of life, from a letter written in 1834, and not a little significant of the mental attitude which the man preserved throughout the forty odd years that remained to him :—

"Here is a glorious sunshiny day : all the morning I read about Nero in Tacitus lying at full length on a bench in the garden : a nightingale singing, and some red anemones eying the sun man- fully not far off. A funny mixture all this : Nero and the delicacy of spring ; all very human however."

And here, again, is what occurs to him as he sits writing in his lodgings in London:—

"A cloud comes over Charlotte Street and seems as if it were sailing softly on the April wind to fall in a blessed shower upon the lilac buds and thirsty anemones somewhere in Essex The German Ocean will dimple with innumerable pin-points, and porpoises rolling near the surface sneeze with unusual pellets of fresh water :-- Can such things be,

And overcome us like a summer cloud, Without our special wonder?'

Oh this wonderful, wonderful world, and we who stand in the middle of it are all in a maze, except poor Matthews of Bedford, who fixes his eyes upon a wooden cross and has no misgiving whatsoever."

In his enjoyment of Nature he could not forget himself.

Thus, elsewhere he speculates, only half in jest, whether the "open eye above" approves his "fruitless way of life," or may it be, seeing that the idleness is so very great a test of virtue, that the idle man, being virtuous, deserves the highest reward, " the more idle, the more deserving ?" And he adds :—" I don't jest ; but I don't propound these things as certain." But he could sometimes speak with certainty, as when he reproves Thomas Carlyle for his wild talk about belief. Carlyle had been expatiating on the substantial goodness which he found

* Letters. and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald. Edited by William Aldis Wright. 3 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. 1888.

in Derbyshire villages, and attributing it to the " funded virtues of many good, humble men gone by," Fitzgerald writes:—

" I hope you will have some mercy now and in future on the 'Hebrew rags' which are grown offensive to you; considering it was these rags that really did bind together those virtues which have transmitted down to us all the good you noticed in Derby- shire. If the old creed was so commendably effective in the Generals and Councillors of two hundred years ago, I think we may be well content to let it work still among the ploughmen and weavers of to-day ; and even to suffer some absurdities in the Form, if the Spirit does well upon the whole."

But the chief interest of the letters is to be found in the literary and critical elements, which are, indeed, their chief constituents. Mr. Fitzgerald always realised intensely what he read. Here is a characteristic passage about Thucydides :—

" The fourth book is the moat interesting I have read; contain- ing all that blockade of Pylos ; that first great thumping of the Athenians at Oropus, after which they for ever dreaded the Theban troops. And it came upon me come stella in tier, when in the account of the taking of Amphipolis, Thucydides, hs raiiva avviwalkev, came with seven ships to the rescue. Fancy old Hallam sticking to his gun at a Martello tower ! This was the way to write well; and this was the way to make literature respectable. Oh ! Alfred Tennyson, could you but have the luck to be put to such employment ! No man could do it better; a more heroic figure to head the defenders of his country could not be."

He seems, by-the-way, to have forgotten that, whether rightly or wrongly, Thucydides was considered to have mismanaged the business very badly, and was banished for his part in it. Perhaps, however, it was this that gave him the idea of writing a history.

Throughout the letters Tennyson is Fitzgerald's hero ; but

his admiration is curiously mingled with censure. To put the matter plainly, he seems to have thought that, although beyond compare the greatest of contemporary English poets, all that has really made him great in the eyes of his countrymen was more or less of a mistake. He would have cancelled everything written since 1842. " I think he might have stopped after 1842, leaving ' Princesses," Ardens," Idylls,' &e., all unborn : all except The Northern Farmer,' which makes me cry." He speaks of " that accursed Princess," and is contemptuous of the " elegiacs about Hallam." " A Man of Genius, who, I think, has crippled his growth by over-elaboration," is the summing-up of his judgment. Yet one cannot but think teat the thought is more prominent, the elaborate form less so, in the later poems.

He has much to say also of Crabbe, a poet whom he heartily appreciated. He knew Crabbe's country, and the poet's son and grandson were among his intimate friends. Doubtless this quickened his sense of his merits ; but his criticism is always admirably acute. The very last thing that he wrote— .

it is dated June, 1883—was his " Introduction to Readings in Crabbe." "I wish," he writes, a propos of Lady Pollock's article on "American Literature," " she had been able to tell us that ten copies of Crabbe sold in America for one in England, rather than of Philip of Artevelde. What do you and Miladi think of these two lines of his, which returned to me the other day ? Talking of poor vagrants, &c.,—

When Law condemns and Justice, with a sigh Pursuing, shakes her sword, and passes by.'

There are heaps of such things lying hid in the tangle of Crabbe's careless verse."

Fitzgerald was somewhat paradoxical in his criticism, as in his views of life ; but he is always vigorous and original. The Literary Remains have been so recently noticed in the Spectator that it is needless now to recur to them.