EDWARD FITZGERALD

1809-1883

It is at once easy and hard to account for the FitzGeraldCult. The fervour of many believers in the gospel propounded, according to Edward FitzGerald,' by the Persian astronomer-poet, is intelligible enough. The faith is that of Epicurus without the incubus of a philosophical system. None could be simpler, or more cheerfully practised: 'Live your life on earth as if earth, not you, were eternal; as if there were neither Heaven nor Hell. Live for the day, without concern for the morrow; or, if there be a morrow, any more for that than for yesterday. Play, if you can find no better diversion, with whatever theories or dogmas, religious or otherwise, you please. Never, at all events, allow them to colour or cloud your fleeting moments. Your active business is to take advantage of the pleasures of the body, while you have a body. Especially, enjoy music and drinking; if in a garden of roses, with a fair companion, so much the better. Therein lies all your duty, which is only to yourself.' Never was a more unethereally agreeable creed preached. But many of FitzGerald's readers who abhor Omar Khayyam's philosophy enthusiastically appreciate the verse and it is much less difficult to explain acceptance of the one than why the other satisfies to the point of rapture.

FitzGerald interpolated into the laborious indolence he loved a bare modicum of poetical work. Of the pieces directly original the most important is Bredfield Hall. The description of the home of successive squires of his race is deliciously simple :

Lo, an English mansion founded

In the elder James's reign, Quaint and stately, and surrounded With a pastoral domain.

With well-timber'd lawn and gardens, And with many a pleasant mead, Skirted by the lofty coverts

Where the hare and pheasant feed.

Flank'd it is with goodly stables,
Shelter'd by coeval trees;

So it lifts its honest gables

Toward the distant German seas; Where it once discern'd the smoke Of old sea-battles far away; Saw victorious Nelson's topmasts Anchoring in Hollesley Bay. But whatever storm might riot, Cannon roar, and trumpet ring, Still amid these meadows quiet Did the yearly violet spring; Still Heaven's starry hand suspended That light balance of the dew, That each night on earth descended, And each morning rose anew; And the ancient house stood rearing Undisturb'd her chimneys high, And her gilded vanes still veering Toward each quarter of the sky :

While like wave to wave succeeding Through the world of joy and strife, Household after household speeding Handed on the torch of life.

Here they lived, and here they greeted,
Maids and matrons, sons and sires,

Wandering in its walks, or seated
Round its hospitable fires;

Till the Bell that not in vain

Had summon'd them to weekly prayer,
Call'd them one by one again

To the church-and left them there!
They, with all their loves and passions,
Compliment, and song, and jest,
Politics, and sports, and fashions,
Merged in everlasting rest!

So they pass-while thou, old Mansion,
Markest with unalter'd face
How like the foliage of thy summers
Race of man succeeds to race.

To most thou stand'st a record sad,
But all the sunshine of the year
Could not make thy aspect glad

To one whose youth is buried here,
In thine ancient rooms and gardens
Buried-and his own no more
Than the youth of those old owners,
Dead two centuries before.

Unto him the fields around thee
Darken with the days gone by;

O'er the solemn woods that bound thee
Ancient sunsets seem to die.

Sighs the selfsame breeze of morning
Through the cypress, as of old;
Ever at the Spring's returning

One same crocus breaks the mould.

Yet the secret worm ne'er ceases,
Nor the mouse behind the wall;

Heart of oak will come to pieces,

And farewell to Bredfield Hall!1

In general he preferred to track and develop other imaginations, in the way of Translation, Paraphrase, or Metaphrase'. Thus he printed versions of six of Calderon's

plays, and of three Greek tragedies, Oedipus, at Thebes, and in Attica, and Agamemnon. He added one of Virgil's garden, and renderings of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát, and Jaimi's Salaman and Abjal. All testify to unsparing pains and an extraordinary gift in him for imagining himself into his author. At times we might almost say that he was the author: as in the tale by the Argive Chorus in the Agamemnon, taken from Aeschylus,' of the use by Fate of the passions of Gods and Men to accomplish its dread decrees. That magnificent Ode laid a spell upon me when long ago I came upon it and the charm works still :

Soon or late sardonic Fate

With Man against himself conspires;

Puts on the mask of his desires :

Up the steps of Time elate

Leads him blinded with his pride,
And gathering as he goes along
The fuel of his suicide:

Until having topt the pyre

Which Destiny permits no higher,

Ambition sets himself on fire;

In conflagration like the crime

Conspicuous through the world and time,
Down amidst his brazen walls
The accumulated Idol falls
To shapeless ashes; Demigod
Under the vulgar hoof down-trod
Whose neck he trod on; not an eye

To weep his fall, nor lip to sigh

For him a prayer; or, if there were,

No God to listen, or reply.

The children have to pay for the sin of the father, and sire

for the guilt of son :

Thus with old Priam, with his royal line,
Kindred and people; yea, the very towers
They crouch'd in, built by masonry divine.2

Then, at the thought of the home desolated by Helen's flight, the stately approval of the fateful doom upon crime and its abettors becomes a flood of sorrowing sympathy with the injured :

Like a dream through sleep she glided

Through the silent city gate,

By a guilty Hermes guided

On the feather'd feet of Theft;
Leaving between those she left
And those she fled to lighted discord,
Unextinguishable Hate;

Leaving him whom least she should,
Menelaus brave and good,

Scarce believing in the mutter'd
Rumour, in the worse than utter'd
Omen of the wailing maidens,

Of the shaken hoary head:
Of deserted board and bed.

For the phantom of the lost one
Haunts him in the wonted places;
Hall and Chamber, which he
paces
Hither, Thither, listening, looking,

Phantom-like himself alone;
Till he comes to loathe the faces
Of the marble mute Colossi,
God-like Forms, and half-divine,
Founders of the Royal line,
Who with all unalter'd quiet
Witness all and make no sign.
But the silence of the chambers,
And the shaken hoary head,
And the voices of the mourning
Women, and of ocean wailing,
Over which with unavailing
Arms he reaches, as to hail

The phantom of a flying sail—

All but answer, Fled! fled! fled!

False dishonour'd! worse than dead!