Carlyle was indeed much what “Old Fitz” describes. He was a powerful solvent of his age. He destroyed many shams, “Hebrew rags,” “old clothes,” as he called them. Both by his own example and his fiery energy he inculcated the “Gospel of Work.” He was not a modern realist, but a man who dealt in realities, who perceived that virtue and beauty and faith are as real as vice and ugliness and unfaith, nay, perhaps more real; but that certainly neither are shams, neither God nor the Devil, though of shams, of false gods and false devils, there are many. His appreciation of poetry was, as is well known, but scant and intermittent. He used to banter Tennyson and call him “a Life-Guardsman spoiled by making poetry,” but he became converted even to his poems, though, as he said, this was surprising to himself. He “felt the pulse of a real man’s heart” in the 1842 volumes. “Ulysses” was a special favourite. He quoted again and again the lines:
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.
“These lines do not make me weep,” he said, “but there is in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read.” He, fortunately, also “took a fancy” to Mrs. Tennyson when he met her as a bride at Tent Lodge, Coniston, partly because, in answer to one of his wild grumbles, she said, “That is not sane, Mr. Carlyle.” An unpublished letter from Carlyle of the date October 1850, describes an admirer of Tennyson’s poems, an ill-starred but brave man, a skilful physician, a friend of Dr. John Carlyle at Leamington, who, after losing the greater part of his face by caries of the bone, had at last been cured, though awfully disfigured. “He fled to Keswick,” writes Carlyle, “and there he now resides, not idle still, nor forsaken of friends, or hope, or domestic joy — a monument of human courtesy, and really a worthy and rather interesting man. Such is your admirer and mine. Heaven be good to him and us.”
FitzGerald, in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, quotes with approval a criticism of Lowell’s that Carlyle “was a poet in all but rhythm”; and it would not be difficult to find “parallel passages” between Tennyson and Carlyle, between Sartor Resartus and “In Memoriam.” The Life of Sterling, too, should be read by any student anxious to “reconstitute the atmosphere” in which that poem grew up, and which, to a certain extent, it still breathes. But “parallel passages” are misleading. Suffice it to say that both went through the storm and stress of a doubting age, both took their stand on the solid rock of God and of real, healthy human nature, — both emerged in the “Eternal Yea.”
Froude, in his history of Carlyle’s Life in London, has a most interesting autobiographic passage about Carlyle’s position and influence in 1843, the time of the publication of Past and Present, which brings this out with special force. He says:
In this condition the best and bravest of my own contemporaries determined to have done with insincerity, to find ground under their feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and what we could honestly regard as true and believe that and live by it. Tennyson became the voice of this feeling in poetry, Carlyle in what was called prose, though prose it was not, but something by itself with a form and melody of its own.
Tennyson’s Poems, the group of Poems which closed with “In Memoriam,” became to many of us what the “Christian Year” was to orthodox Churchmen. We read them, and they became part of our minds, the expression in exquisite language of the feelings which were working in ourselves. Carlyle stood beside him as a prophet and teacher; and to the young, the generous, to every one who took life seriously, who wished to make an honourable use of it and could not be content with sitting down and making money, his words were like the morning reveille.
Others may come at last to the sad conclusion that nothing can be known about the world, that the external powers, whatever they may be, are indifferent to human action or human welfare. To such an opinion some men, and those not the worst, may be driven after weary observation of life. But the young will never believe it; or if they do they have been young only in name.
If the first paragraphs aptly “place” Tennyson and Carlyle, the last, though not intentionally, exactly suits their friend, the translator of the Rubáiyát. FitzGerald remained, as his friend the Master of Trinity College (W. H. Thompson) said, in “Doubting Castle.” Tennyson was the most hopeful, as well as the most balanced and sane, and therefore the most helpful of the three.
Toward the end of his life, Carlyle, in the Inaugural Address given by him as Rector of Edinburgh University, in which he summed up so many of the convictions of a lifetime, put forward the following description of the completely healthy human spirit. “A man all lucid and in equilibrium. His intellect a clear mirror, geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to all objects and impressions made on it, and imaging all things in their correct proportions, not twisted up into convex or concave and distorting everything so that he cannot see the truth of the matter without endless groping and manipulation — healthy, clear and free, and discerning all round about him.” He put this picture before young men as the ideal to be aimed at by the intellectual student, and in particular by the man of letters. “But,” he said, “we can never never attain that at all.” Perhaps not altogether. Perhaps even he who invented the phrase for the poet’s duty of “holding the mirror up to Nature,” did not wholly attain to it. But, according to his measure, it is no bad description of Alfred Tennyson, with the “universality of his mind,” the simplicity of his good sense, the childlike sincerity of his spirit. This quality it was that both Carlyle and FitzGerald found and liked in him.
It has been said that Tennyson and FitzGerald read the same books. One of the best instances of this is to be found in a long letter of FitzGerald’s about posthumous fame and literary immortality. It was written to Cowell in 1847, and is given by Dr. Aldis Wright in his first collection. After speaking of Homer and the Iliad, FitzGerald writes:
Yet as I often think it is not the poetical imagination, but bare Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the Iliad; the history of the world, the great infinitudes of Space and Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me. And when we think that Man must go on in the same plodding way, one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of discovery will distance all his imaginations and dissolve the language in which they are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now after two thousand years: a space that seems long to us whose lives are so brief; but a moment, the twinkling of an eye, if compared (not to Eternity alone), but to the ages which it is now known the world must have existed, and (unless for some external violence) must continue to exist.
Lyell in his book about America, says that the Falls of Niagara, if (as seems certain) they have worked their way back southwards for seven miles, must have taken over 35,000 years to do so at the rate of something over a foot a year! Sometimes they fall back on a stratum that crumbles away from behind them more easily: but then again they have to roll over rock that yields to them scarce more perceptibly than the anvil to the serpent. And these very soft strata, which the Cataract now erodes, contain evidences of a race of animals, and of the action of seas washing over them, long before Niagara came to have a distinct current; and the rocks were compounded ages and ages before those strata! So that, as Lyell says, the geologist, looking at Niagara forgets even the roar of its waters in the contemplation of the awful processes of time that it suggests. It is not only that the vision of Time must wither the Poet’s hope of immortality, but it is in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.
This train of thought was evidently often present to FitzGerald’s mind. It oppressed him. It makes itself felt in the Rubáiyát. It was one of the many great ideas he imported into, or educed from, the old Persian Astronomer.
And fear not lest existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no m
ore;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has poured
Millions of Bubbles like us and will pour
When you and I behind the Veil are past:
Oh but the long long while the world shall last,
Which of our coming and departure heeds
As the Sev’n Seas should heed a pebble-cast.
It was even more constantly present to the mind of Tennyson. Astronomy and Geology had been among his favourite studies from his early youth, and remained so all his life. When I was walking with him toward the Needles and looking at the magnificent chalk cliff below the downs, and spoke about his felicitous epithet for it—”the milky steep,” he said, “The most wonderful thing about that cliff is to think it was all once alive.” The allusions to it in his poems are innumerable:
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 noble late poem “Parnassus,” with a resemblance which is startling. But while the parallel between “Parnassus” 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? pass 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 friendship! 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 attitude toward the Rubáiyát 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.]
&nb
sp; By Edward FitzGerald
(Given to Hallam Lord Tennyson)
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 passionately 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 passion of tears.”
“I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two bumpkins 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.)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series Page 197