1883]

FITZGERALD'S LAST LETTER.

275

He liked the acting of " Beatrice" best in the later scenes; but thought that Ellen Terry ought to have been more of the great lady' in her playing of the part. He spoke highly of the trouble which Irving had taken; but he still considered Irving's best Shakespearian study was Richard III., especially in his witty and sardonic

moments.

The next morning we wandered about the Abbey for a long time. We climbed up to the chantry, and, while the organ and voices of the choristers were sounding through the cathedral, my father suddenly said : "It is beautiful, but what empty and awful mockery if there were no God!"

This year his old and valued friend Fitzgerald died, and my father wrote of him:

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.

Fitz's last letter had been as humorous and full of

warm friendship as ever.

From Edward Fitzgerald to Hallam Tennyson.

MY DEAR HALLAM,

April 19th, 1883.

It is now some six months since I heard of you all, from Annie Ritchie, I think. So be a good boy and write

me just enough to tell me how it fares with mother, and father, all your party.

Of myself I will tell you that I got through what should have been winter well enough; yes, and even through the March that was winter; but, since sun and wind (east wind) combined, I have been somewhat croaky again.

By the way, do you understand by Lady Macbeth's raven the bird himself, or (as I had always supposed) the messenger who had but breath to deliver his message, as Aldis Wright interprets? and may old Hamlet's (does papa remember my "Gimlet Prince of Dunkirk"?) "eternal Blazon" mean not so much of the Eternal as of the Infernal world, as Wright thinks possible from the use of the word in other places by "Williams," "the divine Villiams," as in the case of Fags, an "eternal" willain. I fear I had never even thought of the word but as meaning "long-winded," which however I do not propose to the commentators.

This, among other things, Wright and I talked about when he was with me here at Easter, which reminds me of a crow (not a raven) I have to pick with your father. For Wright had heard from someone that he, the Laureate, had added to his wreath one of the very grandest lines in all blank verse,

"A Mister Wilkinson, a clergyman"

of which I was the author while speaking of my brother-in-law, but which the paltry poet took up as it fell from my inspired lips and has adopted for his own.

You see that bronchitis, ever flourishing his dart over me, fails to make me graver, that is at least while referring to my dear old comrade, whom I should call "master," and with whom. (in spite, perhaps because, of his being rather a "gloomy" soul sometimes, as Carlyle wrote to Emerson) I always did talk more nonsense than to anyone, I believe. Pray heaven I may not be trifling unseasonably with him now, that is, when he or his may not be in the proper mood for it. Write me word of this, dear Hallam, and believe me in sober earnest,

Yours and all yours as ever at 75,

E. FITZGERALD.

1883] POETRY THE FLOWER AND FRUIT OF A LIFE. 277

At this time the following letter was sent by my father to a working man who asked whether he should adopt poetry as a profession:

"I write in compliance with your request, tho' I fear that I can say little to comfort you. Believe me, however, that I am grieved for your loneliness and your sorrow.

Let me hope that you, having, as I think, found the God of Love, will feel day by day less lonely among your fellow-men: for, loving God, you cannot but grow in love towards them, and so forget yourself in them, since love begets love.

As to your poem it is so much the habit of the age to try and express thought and feeling in verse, each one for himself, that there are not I suspect many listeners (for such work as yours), and therefore poetry is not generally profitable in a money point of view. By all means write, if you find solace in verse, but Poetry should be the

do not be in a hurry to publish. flower and fruit of a man's life, in whatever stage of it, to be a worthy offering to the world."

CHAPTER XIV.

VOYAGE ON THE "PEMBROKE CASTLE," SEPT. 1883. TALK ON POETS AND POETRY.

The following is taken from my journal kept on the voyage:

My father and I met the Gladstones at Chester. Thence to Barrow we had a triumphal progress, crowds shouting "Gladstone" at every station. At Barrow we embarked on a tug for the "Pembroke Castle," and left our native land in a tumult of acclaim! Thousands of people lining the shore, and cheering for "Gladstone" and "Tennyson."

The first evening, Sept. 8th, we anchored off the Isle of Man. Gladstone and my father talked of the fact that in England poets and literary men were less known by face to the people than actors and orators. Gladstone advanced the theory that writers being supposed by the public to live in strict seclusion, the public deemed it useless to learn their faces by photographs, since the said public would never see them. Someone noted in the course of the conversation that the photographs of preachers were said by a photographer to sell better than those of any other literary men.

They then discussed the allocution of the Archbishop at the coronation of Edward III. which had been based on the old proverb Vox populi, vox Dei. The Tudors, according to Gladstone, soon stamped out this ancient English feeling.

The next morning the two at breakfast were deploring Arthur Hallam, and saying what a noble intellect he had, and, as a student, how great a loss he had been to Dante scholarship. We steamed past the Ailsa Crag up the coast, and arrived at Islay in the evening.

1883]

TOBERMORY AND LOCH MAREE.

279

During the day Sir Arthur Gordon (now Lord Stanmore) was closely questioned by my father as to what he thought Nirwana was. "I understand," said my father, "that the Buddhists hold their end to be a negation of the known, which equals, according to them, a positive apprehension of the unknown." Sir Arthur said that Nirwana was undoubtedly a quenching of all human passion, and that a Buddhist on being asked what Nirwana was, after pondering some time, answered, "I cannot explain, Nirwana is Nirwana." My father suggested as an illustration that "The soul is like a cork in a bucket of water rising through the different strata, until at last it reaches the top and is at rest."

From Oban we went to Loch Hourn. Gladstone and my father conversed on Homer, both admiring Worsley's translation of the Odyssey. My father wanted "a translation of the Iliad and Odyssey into Biblical prose." Gladstone said that he fully approved of young men taking up the translation of Homer. "It was like warriors storming the walls of a city; all the warriors were slain, but perhaps some day the city might be taken."

Sir William Harcourt met us at Ardnamurchan Point, and accompanied us to Tobermory. We were talking about tobacco, and my father said that his morning pipe after breakfast was the best in the day. Sir William interposed (laughing at his own burlesque), "The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds."

At Tobermory we took on board Sir Andrew and Lady Clark and Miss Clark. In the evening the Gladstones and Miss Laura Tennant ("the little witch" as my father nicknamed her, begged him to read "The Promise of May." Gladstone expressed his admiration of the play, and his opinion that the row on the first night of the play was "because it was above the comprehension of the vast mass of the people present."

From Tobermory we steamed past the grand headlands of Skye to Gairloch. We landed, and drove to Loch Maree between ferny, heathery hills, covered with gray crags, very wild, by the side of a rushing burn. The loch is about eighteen miles long, with rich pine-grown islands scattered here and there, and wooded hills, on either hand, sloping up to a grand fellow, Ben Slioch. Gladstone and my father thought the whole landscape one of the most beautiful they had ever seen.