CHAPTER XXXI. EDWARD FITZGERALD

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Clement King Shorter

Edward FitzGerald once declared that he was about the only friend with whom Borrow had never quarrelled.[205] There was probably no reason for this exceptional amity other than the 'genius for friendship' with which FitzGerald has been rightly credited. There were certainly, however, many points of likeness between the two men which might have kept them at peace. Both had written copiously and out of all proportion to the public demand for their work. Both revelled in translation. FitzGerald's eight volumes in a magnificent American edition consists mainly of translations from various tongues which no man presumably now reads. All the world has read and will long continue to read his translation or paraphrase of Omar KhayyÁm's RubÁiyÁt. 'Old Fitz,' as his friends called him, lives by that, although his letters are among the best in literature. Borrow wrote four books that will live, but had publishers been amenable he would have published forty, and all as unsaleable as the major part of FitzGerald's translations. Both men were Suffolk squires, and yet delighted more in the company of a class other than their own, FitzGerald of boatmen, Borrow of gypsies; both were counted eccentrics in their respective villages. Perhaps alone among the great Victorian authors they lived to be old without receiving in their lives any popular recognition of their great literary achievements. But FitzGerald had a more cultivated mind than Borrow. He loved literature and literary men whilst Borrow did not. His criticism of books is of the best, and his friendships with bookmen are among the most interesting in literary history. 'A solitary, shy, kind-hearted man,' was the verdict upon him of the frequently censorious Carlyle. When Anne Thackeray asked her father which of his friends he had loved best, he answered 'Dear old Fitz, to be sure,' and Tennyson would have said the same. Borrow had none of these gifts as a letter-writer and no genius for friendship. The charm of his style, so indisputable in his best work, is absent from his letters; and his friends were alienated one after another. Borrow's undisciplined intellect and narrow upbringing were a curse to him, from the point of view of his own personal happiness, although they helped him to achieve exactly the work for which he was best fitted. Borrow's acquaintance with FitzGerald was commenced by the latter, who, in July 1853, sent from Boulge Hall, Suffolk, to Oulton Hall, in the same county, his recently published volume Six Dramas of Calderon. He apologises for making so free with 'a great man; but, as usual, I shall feel least fear before a man like yourself who both do fine things in your own language and are deep read in those of others.' He also refers to 'our common friend Donne,' so that it is probable that they had met at Donne's house.[206] The next letter, also published by Dr. Knapp, that FitzGerald writes to Borrow is dated from his home in Great Portland Street in 1856. He presents his friend with a Turkish Dictionary, and announces his coming marriage to Miss Barton, 'Our united ages amount to 96!—a dangerous experiment on both sides'—as it proved. The first reference to Borrow in the FitzGerald Letters issued by his authorised publishers is addressed to Professor Cowell in January 1857:

I was with Borrow a week ago at Donne's, and also at Yarmouth three months ago: he is well, but not yet agreed with Murray. He read me a long translation he had made from the Turkish: which I could not admire, and his taste becomes stranger than ever.[207]

But Borrow's genius if not his taste was always admired by FitzGerald, as the following letter among my Borrow Papers clearly indicates. Borrow had published The Romany Rye at the beginning of May:

OULTON COTTAGE FROM THE BROAD Showing the summer house on the left from a sketch by Henrietta MacOubrey. The house which has replaced it has another aspect. OULTON COTTAGE FROM THE BROAD
Showing the summer house on the left from a sketch by Henrietta MacOubrey. The house which has replaced it has another aspect.
THE SUMMER HOUSE OULTON, AS IT IS TO DAY Which when compared with Miss MacOubrey's sketch shows that it has been reroofed and probably rebuilt altogether. THE SUMMER HOUSE OULTON, AS IT IS TO DAY
Which when compared with Miss MacOubrey's sketch shows that it has been reroofed and probably rebuilt altogether.

To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall.

Goldington Hall, Bedford, May 24/57[208]

My dear Sir,—Your Book was put into my hands a week ago just as I was leaving London; so I e'en carried it down here, and have been reading it under the best Circumstances:—at such a Season—in the Fields as they now are—and in company with a Friend I love best in the world—who scarce ever reads a Book, but knows better than I do what they are made of from a hint.

Well, lying in a Paddock of his, I have been travelling along with you to Horncastle, etc.,—in a very delightful way for the most part; something as I have travelled, and love to travel, with Fielding, Cervantes, and Robinson Crusoe—and a smack of all these there seems to me, with something beside, in your book. But, as will happen in Travel, there were some spots I didn't like so well—didn't like at all: and sometimes wished to myself that I, a poor 'Man of Taste,' had been at your Elbow (who are a Man of much more than Taste) to divert you, or get you by some means to pass lightlier over some places. But you wouldn't have heeded me, and won't heed me, and must go your own way, I think—And in the parts I least like, I am yet thankful for honest, daring, and original Thought and Speech such as one hardly gets in these mealy-mouthed days. It was very kind of you to send me your book.

My Wife is already established at a House called 'Albert's Villa,' or some such name, at Gorlestone—but a short walk from you: and I am to find myself there in a few days. So I shall perhaps tell you more of my thoughts ere long. Now I shall finish this large Sheet with a Tetrastich of one Omar KhayyÁm who was an Epicurean Infidel some 500 years ago:

[209]

and am yours very truly,
Edward FitzGerald.

In a letter to Cowell about the same time—June 5, 1857—FitzGerald writes that he is about to set out for Gorleston, Great Yarmouth:

Within hail almost lives George Borrow, who has lately published, and given me, two new volumes of Lavengro called Romany Rye, with some excellent things, and some very bad (as I have made bold to write to him—how shall I face him!) You would not like the book at all I think.[210]

It was Cowell, it will be remembered, who introduced FitzGerald to the Persian poet Omar, and afterwards regretted the act. The first edition of The RubÁiyÁt of Omar KhayyÁm appeared two years later, in 1859. Edward Byles Cowell was born in Ipswich in 1826, and he was educated at the Ipswich Grammar School. It was in the library attached to the Ipswich Library Institution that Cowell commenced the study of Oriental languages. In 1842 he entered the business of his father and grandfather as a merchant and maltster. When only twenty years of age he commenced his friendship with Edward FitzGerald, and their correspondence may be found in Dr. Aldis Wright's FitzGerald Correspondence. In 1850 he left his brother to carry on the business and entered himself at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he passed six years. At intervals he read Greek with FitzGerald and, later, Persian. FitzGerald commenced to learn this last language, which was to bring him fame, when he was forty-four years of age. In 1856 Cowell was appointed to a Professorship of English History at Calcutta, and from there he sent FitzGerald a copy of the manuscript of Omar KhayyÁm, afterwards lent by FitzGerald to Borrow. Much earlier than this—in 1853—FitzGerald had written to Borrow:

At Ipswich, indeed, is a man whom you would like to know, I think, and who would like to know you; one Edward Cowell: a great scholar, if I may judge.... Should you go to Ipswich do look for him! a great deal more worth looking for (I speak with no sham modesty, I am sure) than yours,—E. F. G.[211]

Twenty-six years afterwards—in 1879—we find FitzGerald writing to Dr. Aldis Wright to the effect that Cowell had been seized with 'a wish to learn Welsh under George Borrow':

And as he would not venture otherwise, I gave him a Note of Introduction, and off he went, and had an hour with the old Boy, who was hard of hearing and shut up in a stuffy room, but cordial enough; and Cowell was glad to have seen the Man, and tell him that it was his Wild Wales which first inspired a thirst for this language into the Professor.[212]

This introduction and meeting are described by Professor Cowell in the following letter:[213]

Cambridge, December 10, 1892.

Dear Sir,—I fear I cannot help you much by my reminiscences of Borrow. I never had the slightest interest in the gipsies, but I always had a corner in my heart for Spain and Wales, and consequently The Bible in Spain and Wild Wales have always been favourite books. But though Borrow's works were well known to me, I never saw him but once, and what I saw of him then made me feel that he was one of those men who put the best part of themselves into their books. We get the pure gold there without the admixture of alloy which daily life seemed to impart.

I was staying one autumn at Lowestoft some ten years or more ago when I asked my dear old friend, Mr. Edward FitzGerald, to give me a letter of introduction to Mr. George Borrow. Armed with this I started on my pilgrimage and took a chaise for Oulton Hall. I remember as we drew near we turned into a kind of drift road through the fields where the long sweeping boughs of the trees hung so low that I lost my hat more than once as we drove along. My driver remarked that the old gentleman would not allow any of his trees to be cut. When we reached the hall I went in at the gate into the farmyard, but I could see nobody about anywhere. I walked up to the front door, but nobody answered my knock except some dogs, who began barking from their kennels. At last in answer to a very loud knock, the door was opened by an old gentleman whom I at once recognised by the engraving to be Borrow himself. I gave him my letter and introduced myself. He replied in a tone of humorous petulance, 'What is the good of your bringing me a letter when I haven't got my spectacles to read it?' However, he took me into his room, where I fancy my knock had roused him from a siesta. We soon got into talk. He began by some unkind remarks about one or two of our common friends, but I soon turned the subject to books, especially Spanish and Welsh books. Here I own I was disappointed in his conversation. I talked to him about Ab Gwilym, whom he speaks so highly of in Wild Wales, but his interest was languid. He did not seem interested when I told him that the London Society of Cymmrodorion were publishing in their journal the Welsh poems of Iolo Goch, the bard of Owen Glendower who fought with our Henry v., two of whose poems Borrow had given spirited translations of in Wild Wales. He told me he had heaps of translations from Welsh books somewhere in his cupboards but he did not know where to lay his hand on them. He did not show me one Welsh or Spanish book of any kind. You may easily imagine that I was disappointed with my interview and I never cared to visit him again. Borrow was a man of real genius, and his Bible in Spain and Wild Wales are unique books in their way, but with all his knowledge of languages he was not a scholar. I should be the last person to depreciate his Sleeping Bard, for I owe a great deal to it as it helped me to read the Welsh original, but it is full of careless mistakes. The very title is wrong; it should not be the Visions of the Sleeping Bard but the Visions of the Bard Sleep, as the bard or prophet Sleep shows the author in a series of dreams—his visions of life, death, and hell, which form the three chapters of the book.

Borrow knew nothing of philology. His strange version of 'Om mani padme hÛm' (Oh! the gem in the lotus ho!) must have been taken from some phonetic representation of the sounds as heard by an ignorant traveller in China or Mongolia.

I have written this long letter lured on by my recollections, but after all I can tell you nothing. Surely it is best that Borrow should remain a name; we have the best part of him still living in his best books.

'He gave the people of his best;
 His worst he kept, his best he gave.'

I don't see why we should trouble ourselves about his 'worst.' He had his weaker side like all of us, the foolish part of his nature as well as the wise; but 'de mortuis nil nisi bonum' especially applies in such cases.—I remain, dear sir, yours sincerely,

E. B. Cowell.

There is one short letter from FitzGerald to Borrow in Dr. Aldis Wright's FitzGerald Letters. It is dated June 1857 and from it we learn that FitzGerald lent Borrow the Calcutta manuscript of Omar KhayyÁm, upon which he based his own immortal translation, and from a letter to W. H. Thompson in 1861 we learn that Cowell, who had inspired the writing of FitzGerald's Omar KhayyÁm, Donne and Borrow were the only three friends to whom he had sent copies of his 'peccadilloes in verse' as he calls his remarkable translation,[214] and this two years after it was published. A letter, dated July 6, 1857,[215] asks for the return of FitzGerald's copy of the Ouseley manuscript of Omar KhayyÁm, Borrow having clearly already returned the Calcutta manuscript. This letter concludes on a pathetic note:

My old Parson Crabbe is bowing down under epileptic fits, or something like, and I believe his brave old white head will soon sink into the village church sward. Why, our time seems coming. Make way, gentlemen!

Borrow comes more than once into the story of FitzGerald's great translation of Omar KhayyÁm, which in our day has caused so great a sensation, and deserves all the enthusiasm that it has excited as the

' ... golden Eastern lay,
 Than which I know no version done
 In English more divinely well,'

to quote Tennyson's famous eulogy. Cowell, to his after regret, for he had none of FitzGerald's dolce far niente paganism, had sent FitzGerald from Calcutta, where he was, the manuscript of Omar KhayyÁm's RubÁiyÁt in Persian, and FitzGerald was captured by it. Two years later, as we know, he produced the translation, which was so much more than a translation. 'Omar breathes a sort of consolation to me,' he wrote to Cowell. 'Borrow is greatly delighted with your MS. of Omar which I showed him,' he says in another letter to Cowell (June 23, 1857), 'delighted at the terseness so unusual in Oriental verse.'[216]The next two letters by FitzGerald from my Borrow Papers are of the year 1859, the year of the first publication of the RubÁiyÁt:

To George Borrow, Esq.

10 Marine Parade, Lowestoft.

My dear Borrow,—I have come here with three nieces to give them sea air and change. They are all perfectly quiet, sensible, and unpretentious girls; so as, if you will come over here any day or days, we will find you board and bed too, for a week longer at any rate. There is a good room below, which we now only use for meals, but which you and I can be quite at our sole ease in. Won't you come?

I purpose (and indeed have been some while intentioning) to go over to Yarmouth to look for you. But I write this note in hope it may bring you hither also.

Donne has got his soldier boy home from India—Freddy—I always thought him a very nice fellow indeed. No doubt life is happy enough to all of them just now. Donne has been on a visit to the Highlands—which seems to have pleased him—I have got an MS. of Bahram and his Seven Castles (Persian), which I have not yet cared to look far into. Will you? It is short, fairly transcribed, and of some repute in its own country, I hear. Cowell sent it me from Calcutta; but it almost requires his company to make one devote one's time to Persian, when, with what remains of one's old English eyes, one can read the Odyssey and Shakespeare.

With compliments to the ladies, believe me, Yours very truly,

Edward FitzGerald.

I didn't know you were back from your usual summer tour till Mr. Cobb told my sister lately of having seen you.

To George Borrow, Esq.

Bath House, Lowestoft, October 10/59.

Dear Borrow,—This time last year I was here and wrote to ask about you. You were gone to Scotland. Well, where are you now? As I also said last year: 'If you be in Yarmouth and have any mind to see me I will go over some day; or here I am if you will come here. And I am quite alone. As it is I would bus it to Yarmouth but I don't know if you and yours be there at all, nor if there, whereabout. If I don't hear at all I shall suppose you are not there, on one of your excursions, or not wanting to be rooted out; a condition I too well understand. I was at Gorleston some months ago for some while; just after losing my greatest friend, the Bedfordshire lad who was crushed to death, coming home from hunting, his horse falling on him. He survived indeed two months, and I had been to bid him eternal adieu, so had no appetite for anything but rest—rest—rest. I have just seen his widow off from here. With kind regards to the ladies, Yours very truly,

Edward FitzGerald.

In a letter to George Crabbe the third, and the grandson of the poet, in 1862, FitzGerald tells him that he has just been reading Borrow's Wild Wales, 'which I like well because I can hear him talking it. But I don't know if others will like it.' 'No one writes better English than Borrow in general,' he says. But FitzGerald, as a lover of style, is vexed with some of Borrow's phrases, and instances one: '"The scenery was beautiful to a degree," What degree? When did this vile phrase arise?' The criticism is just, but Borrow, in common with many other great English authors whose work will live was not uniformly a good stylist. He has many lamentable fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But he will, by virtue of a wonderful individuality, outlive many a good stylist. His four great books are immortal, and one of them is Wild Wales.

We have a glimpse of FitzGerald in the following letter in my possession, by the friend who had introduced him to Borrow, William Bodham Donne:[217]

To George Borrow, Esq.

40 Weymouth Street, Portland Place, W., November 28/62.

My dear Borrow,—Many thanks for the copy of Wild Wales reserved for and sent to me by Mr. R. Cooke.[218] Before this copy arrived I had obtained one from the London Library and read it through, not exactly stans pede in uno, but certainly almost at a stretch. I could not indeed lay it down, it interested me so much. It is one of the very best records of home travel, if indeed so strange a country as Wales is can properly be called home, I have ever met with.

Immediately on closing the third volume I secured a few pages in Fraser's Magazine for Wild Wales, for though you do not stand in need of my aid, yet my notice will not do you a mischief, and some of the reviewers of Lavengro were, I recollect, shocking blockheads, misinterpreting the letter and misconceiving the spirit of that work. I have, since we met in Burlington Arcade, been on a visit to FitzGerald. He is in better spirits by far than when I saw him about the same time in last year. He has his pictures and his chattels about him, and has picked up some acquaintance among the merchants and mariners of Woodbridge, who, although far below his level, are yet better company than the two old skippers he was consorting with in 1861. They—his present friends—came in of an evening, and sat and drank and talked, and I enjoyed their talk very much, since they discussed of what they understood, which is more than I can say generally of the fine folks I occasionally (very occasionally now) meet in London. I should have said more about your book, only I wish to keep it for print: and you don't need to be told by me that it is very good.—With best regards to Mrs. Borrow and Miss Clarke, I am, yours ever truly,

W. B. Donne.

The last letter from FitzGerald to Borrow is dated many years after the correspondence I have here printed,[219] and from it we gather that there had been no correspondence in the interval.[220] FitzGerald writes from Little Grange, Woodbridge, in January 1875, to say that he had received a message from Borrow that he would be glad to see him at Oulton. 'I think the more of it,' says FitzGerald, 'because I imagine, from what I have heard, that you have slunk away from human company as much as I have.' He hints that they might not like one another so well after a fifteen years' separation. He declares with infinite pathos that he has now severed himself from all old ties, has refused the invitations of old college friends and old schoolfellows. To him there was no companionship possible for his declining days other than his reflections and verses. It is a fine letter, filled with that graciousness of spirit that was ever a trait in FitzGerald's noble nature. The two men never met again. When Borrow died, in 1881, FitzGerald, who followed him two years later, suggested to Dr. Aldis Wright, afterwards to be his (FitzGerald's) executor, who was staying with him at the time, that he should look over Borrow's books and manuscripts if his stepdaughter so desired. If this had been arranged, and Dr. Aldis Wright had written Borrow's life, there would have been no second biographer.[221]

FOOTNOTES:

[205] This was said by FitzGerald to his friend Frederick Spalding.

[206] Edward FitzGerald to George Borrow, in Knapp's Life, vol. ii. p. 346.

[207] The Works of Edward FitzGerald, vol. ii. p. 59 (Macmillan).

[208] FitzGerald was staying with his friends Mr. and Mrs. W. K. Browne. There is no letter other than this one to Borrow to recall that visit, which is, however, referred to in the FitzGerald Correspondence (Works, vol. ii. p. 75) by the following sentence:—'When in Bedfordshire I put away almost all Books except Omar KhayyÁm! which I could not help looking over in a Paddock covered with Buttercups and brushed by a delicious Breeze, while a dainty racing Filly of Browne's came startling up to wonder and to snuff about me.' The 'friend' of the letter was of course Mr. W. K. Browne, who was more of an open air man than a bookman.

[209] I am indebted to Mr. Edward Heron-Allen for the information that this is the original of the last verse but one in FitzGerald's first version of the RubÁiyÁt:

r 74. Ah Moon of my Delight, who knowest no wane,
 The Moon of Heaven is rising once again,
 How oft, hereafter rising, shall she look
 Through this same Garden after me—in vain.

The literal translation is:

[Persian]
 Since no one will guarantee thee a to-morrow,
 [Persian]
 Make thou happy now this lovesick heart;
 [Persian]
 Drink wine in the moonlight, O Moon, for the Moon
 [Persian]
 Shall seek us long and shall not find us.

[210] The Works of Edward FitzGerald, vol. ii. p. 74 (Macmillan).

[211] Letters of Edward FitzGerald, vol. ii. p. 15.

[212] Ibid., vol. iv. p. 85 (Macmillan).

[213] First published in The Sphere, October 31, 1903. The letter was written to Mr. James Hooper of Norwich.

[214] Works of Edward FitzGerald, vol. ii. p. 135 (Macmillan).

[215] Published by Dr. Knapp in Borrow's Life, vol. ii. p. 348 (Murray).

[216] We learn from FitzGerald that Borrow's eyesight gave way about this time, and his wife had to keep all books from him.

[217] There are two or three references to Borrow in William Bodham Donne and his Friends, edited by Catharine B. Johnson (Methuen). The most important of these is in a letter from Donne to Bernard Barton, dated from Bury St. Edmunds, September 12th, 1848:

'We have had a great man here, and I have been walking with him and aiding him to eat salmon and mutton and drink port—George Borrow; and what is more, we fell in with some gypsies and I heard the speech of Egypt, which sounded wonderously like a medley of broken Spanish and dog Latin. Borrow's face lighted by the red turf fire of the tent was worth looking at. He is ashy white now, but twenty years ago, when his hair was like a raven's wing, he must have been hard to discriminate from a born Bohemian. Borrow is best on the tramp, if you can walk four and a half miles per hour—as I can with ease and do by choice—and can walk fifteen of them at a stretch—which I can compass also—then he will talk Iliads of adventures even better than his printed ones. He cannot abide those amateur pedestrians who saunter, and in his chair he is given to groan and be contradictory. But on Newmarket Heath, in Rougham Woods, he is at home, and specially when he meets with a thorough vagabond like your present correspondent.'

In June 1874 FitzGerald writes to Donne:

'I saw in some AthenÆum a somewhat contemptuous notice of G. B.'s Rommany Lil or whatever the name is. I can easily understand that B. should not meddle with science of any sort; but some years ago he would not have liked to be told so; however, old age may have cooled him now.'

[218] Mr. Robert Cooke was a partner in John Murray's firm at this time.

[219] It is to be found in Dr. Knapp's Life, vol. ii. pp. 248-9.

[220] I have a copy of FitzGerald's.

[221] Dr. Aldis Wright tells me that he did go over to Oulton to see Mrs. MacOubrey, and gave her the best advice he could, but it was neglected.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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