Lyttelton in his late distinguished defeat, of which you have, of
course, heard all particulars with apostolic embellishments and
illustrations both from other apostolic souls and from Merivale. I
have been happy in being able in these trying circumstances to
preserve my natural tranquillity. My view of the nature of the contest
is this: The University would select Lord Lyndhurst as the sort of man
whom a University should delight to honour. A dissentient minority say
not content. The majority reply to the dissentients, 'Why divide? You
see you cannot win.' The minority rejoins, 'Never mind; divide we
will, win or not win. If Lord Lyndhurst is to be selected for such an
honour as this, it shall be deliberately and not by accident. The
objections shall be formally brought forward and formally overruled.'
The bringing of the question to the poll I consider as an appeal to
the constituency to consider what they were about; and, in spite of
the result, I am glad it has been brought to this issue. For the
credit of the University it was fit it should be known that there were
500 dissentients, and for the instruction of mankind it was fit it
should be known that there was a majority of two masters of arts to
one who thought Lord Lyndhurst the proper man to receive the honours
and dignities of the University. Had I been an enemy I should have
voted in the majority; but being a dutiful, though not perhaps a very
respectful son, I was glad of an opportunity of making the 586 into
587."
The friends of Lord Lyndhurst made every effort to secure his election,
and we learn from his Life by Sir Theodore Martin that he was only induced
to be a candidate on condition that his return would be certain. The
majority was 480.
Thompson, who had returned to Cambridge, was at this time in feeble
health, and, as it was not known where a letter would find him, FitzGerald
wrote under cover to Spedding, who was still at the Colonial Office. The
letter does not appear to have been preserved, but it suggested to
Spedding some criticism of the theatres and actors of the time which is
not without interest at the present day.
"Fitz," he writes on November 25, 1840, "has forwarded this to me that
I may direct it properly, and as it is not sealed I have made free
with the contents. The meaning of the writing on the wall had
hitherto escaped me, I confess, but the effect of my head in the Pit
has often occurred to me as something unseemly, like Scriptures out of
Church; inasmuch as when I am by myself I always choose a place where
I can wear my hat. I have sometimes thought of getting a wig to wear
in such places of vain resort. But to say the truth, a bad play will
often afford more rational entertainment for two or three hours than
an average dinner party, provided a man goes to it with an
understanding that such a thing can be neither better nor worse than a
shadow, and with an imagination to amend it. It is strange enough, for
your best modern plays and your modern acting of the best plays
(except in a very few instances) are so wretched that one should think
they could only bore and disgust one--meagre, vapid, false and vulgar
in the highest degree. One only wonders that so many human heads and
hearts can consent to sit it out, and be amused and refreshed by it. I
believe it is this very problem which gives the theory an interest to
me, for certainly the spectators are to me an integral part of the
spectacle (do I use 'integral' right? I could never properly
understand the calculus), and the most entertaining part of the action
is the action of the play upon the audience. You not only see the
mirror held up to Nature, but you see Nature looking at her image in
it, which presents her in still another aspect. Of the nature of the
multitude, their ways of thinking and feeling certainly, and partly
too of their ways of acting, much may be learned in the pit of a
theatre. From the effect of Bulwer's plays upon the play-going public
one might have inferred the effect of his novels upon the reading
public, almost as surely as you might have inferred the effect of his
plays from observing the style of acting which is most popular. But
besides my pleasure in contemplating the nature of the fool multitude,
I am curious about the laws of art, and I observe, in that as in other
things, that specimens of the want of the thing are as instructive as
the specimen of the thing itself. I never understood Shakespeare's
idea of Julius Caesar till I once saw George Bennett enact him; and I
think I gained more light as to the meaning of many parts of Falstaff
in the _Merry Wives_ from the grossest and, I think, worst piece of
acting I ever saw (by Bartley) than I have gained as to _Benedick_
from C. Kemble, or _Hamlet_ from Macready. Altogether, I find that the
clumsy, tawdry, motley pageant, with its little good and much bad,
its touches of nature here and there, and its scene after scene of
vulgarity, insipidity, cant, and monstrous unnaturalness, has the
effect of provoking my understanding and imagination into agreeable
exercise."
The time had come when, after six years of service, Spedding resolved to
shake himself free from the uncongenial business of the Colonial Office,
and devote himself to what was to be the work of his life. On the 19th of
August 1841 he writes from Wycliffe Rectory to Thompson who was then in
Germany:
You told me to write on speculation and not put off too long, but I
suppose I am not the less qualified to perform the former part of your
injunction for having neglected to perform the latter. But I suppose
the worst consequence will be that my letter will not reach you, by
which you will save something in postage and lose nothing in any other
way. The fact is that your letter reached me during the last hours of
my official life, when between the duty of clearing my table, and
preparing for another and a better life (packing up, to wit), I had no
time to write anything that was to go as far as Dresden. From the
business of Downing St. I relapsed suddenly to the not less absorbing
recreations of the 12th August and the moors; and since we left the
grouse in quiet I have been on constant duty in looking at rocks and
rivers and whatever there is to be looked at in a country not barren
of natural attractions and the scene of one of Walter Scott's poems.
To-day I have been I do not know how many miles to see a handsome
modern house and fine estate on the banks of the Tees, and to enjoy
the most formidable of all mortal entertainments, a lunch of about 16
persons at a house you were never in before; all low voices and only
one of the family known to you by name. However the beef was good, and
silence is richer than speech. I am now returned, my skin is full of
tea and bread and butter, and the room is full of young women talking
about ghosts and singing Irish melodies. I have borrowed this sheet of
thin paper that you may have the less to pay, and I have set off in
this minute hand that I may have the more room to utter whatsoever
shall be given to me to utter in this house: what that may be I shall
not stay to conjecture, but proceed at once to the proof.
I need not describe to you the appearance of London or the manners of
the inhabitants in the galleries and institutions with which it
abounds, as you have had opportunities of learning better by the use
of your own eyes and ears as much about these as you wish to know.
Something I might say about the manners and morals of Downing Street
which would be new to you, that section of London society having been
rarely penetrated by travellers, and if penetrated still more rarely
escaped from without the loss of that peculiar faculty by virtue of
which man tells truth. But this also I shall at present spare you.
Downing Street already lies behind me, and I think it is St. Paul who
tells us that we should fix our eyes on what is before, and what, I
wonder, is before _me_? I see a fair array of years abounding in
capabilities and in leisure to cultivate them, and if I could follow
that precept of St. Paul's faithfully, and abstain from looking
backwards at an equally fair array of opportunities unimproved and
leisure run to waste, I should think the prospect a splendid one....
For these six years past I have been working for other men's purposes,
and cultivating my life for their use. Now I set up for myself; and
the question is this, of all things which most need to be done what am
I best able to do?... But I had forgotten that all this will be a
mystery to you who do not know what I have done to myself since I saw
you. You must know this that as soon as it was clear which way the
elections were going, I wrote to Stephen to say that I meant to leave
the C.O., not because the change of parties need make any difference
to me, but because my position had already yielded all the good I
could expect from it, and a change of administration formed a natural
period which it would not be desirable to let pass, the gain of the
salary being, in fact, to a person who could live without it, no
adequate compensation for the loss of time to a person who could use
it in other ways, etc. etc. Stephen thought me quite right, and
recommends me to persevere in my present intention of making
literature my business: so far at least as to make a fair experiment
of it: not doubting that, for a man who has enough to live upon, and
who has resolution enough to employ five or six hours every day in
reading or writing with some definite practical object, there is no
kind of life so eligible: and there is plenty of work to do. So on the
10th of August 1841 (which day I will trouble you, in the memoir of my
life which you will prefix to your edition of the fragments of my
great work which you will find among my papers at my untimely death,
to make for ever memorable) I took my leave of the Colonial Office and
recovered possession of my time and my hours at the moderate cost of
£150 per annum, and here I am with the responsibility: a German, I
suppose, would spell it with a capital R. And now what have you to
say? One thing I really think is promising. I set out with a definite
project, not too big or too remote: and if I had not involved myself
in a desire to make something of these Baconian letters, which I could
not so well do without more leisure and liberty to hunt down my game,
I should not have trusted myself to my own guidance with quite so free
a conscience. I have already made an entrance into the Lambeth Library
and satisfied myself that former editors are not to be trusted; and
that a great deal may probably be done by a man who unites two
important requisites which have not yet met in any of them, industry
and brains. Would you believe, for instance, that there is more than
one letter from Francis Bacon to his Mother, and vice versa, which
have never been included in any collection of his letters? And that
there are many letters between Antony Bacon and his mother relating to
the prospects and goings on of the two brothers between the ages of
twenty and thirty-five which no biographer of Francis appears to have
studied, probably none has ever seen? Mr. Maitland showed me a MS.
commonplace book containing a good many anecdotes about Bacon and the
people of that time (most of them published I believe in the
Apophthegms, etc.) interspersed with memoranda of all kinds, of which
he says he can find no account. I suspect it to be Dr. Rawley's
private memorandum book; a point which may easily be verified: and if
so it will no doubt contain many things which being laid alongside of
many other things will throw light upon various obscurities. That such
a MS. should be known to exist in the Lambeth Library, and that, after
some half-dozen editors have been over the ground in pursuit of
Baconiana, it should remain there without anything being known about
it, is it not a proof that in fact the ground has yet to be explored?
And if so who can say but that among the volumes upon volumes of
letters relating to these times which are still preserved in print or
in MS., matter may not be found out of which to construct an edition
of Bacon's letters that will read as easily and as clearly as a
novel. I am sure if it were done properly, it would be one of the most
valuable historical and probably the most valuable biographical works
that has been produced about these times. For there is hardly any
contemporary political question of interest which is not indirectly or
directly touched upon at one time or another, and which would not
therefore require elucidation.
The subject is pursued in the next letter written from Mirehouse ten days
later to Thompson, who was still abroad.
I am quite sure that much remains to be done with regard to those
Baconian letters which I told you of, and I am sure too that without
leisure and liberty I at least could not fairly set about it. I have
been among the MSS. in the Lambeth Library and found that, though
there are probably not many letters of Bacon's which have not been
published, there is a wilderness of papers closely connected with them
which has never been properly explored. It is a field in which nobody
has been at work that had both industry and brains. For the present,
therefore, I look forward to this as my main business, in which if I
prosper, I shall know what to do when (Peel having lost that no
confidence in his opponents in which consists all the confidence he
has to rest upon himself) Lord John shall come in again and fortune
shall be again in a condition to be wooed; if I prosper not, I shall
still know what to do; though it will be different. But I am filling a
second letter with myself.
I am afraid you are not likely to see any people of the right sort,
such as you describe, at Munich; though I duly advertised them of your
street and lodging. Pollock has been circuiting as simple barrister,
and will shortly have to circuit again as Barrister revising. In the
between he comes here, and indeed I expect him this evening....
Douglas Heath had meant to join John, who has been tumbling up and
down the Alps under the guidance of some Geologist; an unsafe guide, I
should fancy, for what death so sweet to a Geologist as to knock out
his brains against a stone; or to be embedded in some liquid,
liquefying, or indurescent substance (such as snow or mud or lava) in
which a million of years hence some other Geologist may find him
embedded and so satisfy himself that a man was once there? He seems
to have had some fine rides on the backs of avalanches down fissures.
But Douglas was kept in London by business partly, and partly by the
illness of his mother and the uncertain health of his father, and does
not expect to get out of England this year. I hope he will contrive to
get hither in about a month. I am afraid there is no chance of your
finding a chink of time between your return to England and your
October term business in which you might pay us another visit. Your
first object ought to be to put yourself into the most convenient
place for being thoroughly cured, which implies the neighbourhood of a
thoroughly good Doctor: a luxury which we cannot offer you here. But I
hope that, now the year is mine all round to dispose of as I think
best, we shall be able some day to make our several times suit and our
several lines meet at Mirehouse, and run on together for a while. You
are very much approved of by everybody here.
Early in the year 1842, Spedding accompanied the first Lord Ashburton to
the United States as Secretary to a commission, the object of which was to
determine a boundary question which was successfully settled by the treaty
of Washington. He writes to Thompson from Gosport on February 9, 1842:
Having heard that you think I might have written to you upon the
occasion by my breaking out in this new light, and partly concurring
in that sentiment, and finding myself as much at leisure for the rest
of the evening as if the destinies of no country, much less the
destinies of two, depended upon me, I sit down to shake mental hands
with you, and to wish you prosperity during my eclipse and setting
behind the Atlantic.
I will not trouble you with explanations concerning my inducement for
taking so considerable a step as this. You will easily understand that
I had to listen to more inward voices than one, and to wait the result
of much confused inward debate before I decided to take it.
Fortunately there was no question as to the comparative worth of the
said two voices, nor any doubt as to the side on which they
respectively appeared. It was the Fiend, _i.e._ the baser nature, the
human instinct, that said, "Budge not." The better voice said, "Go,
why not?" The decision was soon taken, and being taken, the thing
itself seemed much easier than it looked at first. It is now above
three weeks since I have looked at it only as a thing that is to be,
and I almost feel as if it would be strange if it were otherwise. What
the effect of it may be on my character and fortunes I do not trouble
myself to prophesy. It will at least make me think many things easy
which seemed unapproachably difficult a month ago. It will teach me to
keep accounts. And it will give me some insight into the nature of a
state-conscience, a state-reason, a state-understanding, and a
state-character. Many things besides. It may very likely ruin my
reputation, but I am not sure that that would be an evil. I should be
much happier, I think, without any reputation, not to add that if it
were gone, I should be thrown upon my resources, which might after all
turn out to be a better thing. But let these things pass. One thing is
quite clear, that I could not spend the next six months in any way by
which I should gain so much either in knowledge or in power. My
immortal work must, of course, be suspended, but what is six months in
an immortality? By the way, touching my Falstaff Platonizing, I agree
with you, as reported by Merivale, that the insertion of such a joke
would be unbecoming in a Museum Academicum, the more's the pity, for
with the joke itself I was a good deal pleased. But then, on the other
hand, you will not let me prefix a serious introduction, explaining
the thing which it is meant to illustrate. I can only suggest that you
should yourself write an introduction _refuting_ the said theory, if
you really believe that the thing is worth putting in at all. But let
this also pass, for I see the bottom of my paper (by the way I suppose
I must not say such a thing in the U.S.), and the chambermaid would
fain be dismissed to her bed. At present you may truly say that I am
going ahead, for I alone of the suite have arrived, and my master, by
being unpunctual, has lost a day of fair wind.
At this time FitzGerald wrote to Laurence, the artist:
You have, of course, read the account of Spedding's forehead landing
in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it for
Beachy Head. There is a Shakespeare cliff, and a Spedding cliff. Good
old fellow! I hope he'll come back safe and sound, forehead and all.
Not swords, nor cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it,
could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that
no hair can grow at such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon's
virtue is so rarefied, that the common consciences of men cannot
endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea
of Spedding's forehead; we find it somehow or other in all things,
just peering out of all things; you see it in a milestone, Thackeray
says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont
Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of Geneva. We have great laughing
over this.
Tennyson's 1842 volume came out while Spedding was at Washington, and
FitzGerald, writing to Pollock, regretted that it contained some pieces
which he thought better omitted.
I agree with you quite about the skipping-rope, etc. But the bald men
of the Embassy would tell you otherwise. I should not wonder if the
whole theory of the Embassy, perhaps the discovery of America itself,
was involved in that very Poem. Lord Bacon's honesty may, I am sure,
be found there.
"The Yankees," Donne writes to Bernard Barton, "seem to think baldness
a rarity appertaining to the old country, for their papers could not
sufficiently express their wonder, when Ld. Ashburton went over about
the Boundary question, at the lack of hair among his attachés.
Spedding's crown imperial of a cranium struck them like a view of
Teneriffe or Atlas."
"Nothing has been heard of Spedding," says FitzGerald, "but we all
conclude, from the nature of the case, that he has not been scalped."
The mission ended happily in the treaty of Washington, and Spedding
returned to his friends, in spite of the forebodings of FitzGerald, who
says:
A man on the coach the other day told me that all was being settled
very easily in America, but stage-coach politicians are not always to
be trusted.
By the end of the year (1842), Spedding was again at Mirehouse.
"I am at present," he writes to Thompson, "absorbed in teaching the
young idea of a water spaniel how to shoot. He promises to be an
accomplished dog. He can already catch a wounded hare and bring it,
rescue a snipe out of a rapid stream, hunt (though in vain) for a
water-hen among the roots of an alder-bush, and wait with intense
breathless anxiety to hear the sound of a duck's wing in the gloaming.
In time I hope to teach him to do as I bid him. We are all well here.
How is all at Cambridge? What shall you do at Christmas? If I am still
here, can you come so far north? You shall see the dog."
But although these country delights had their attractions for him, he had
for some years established himself in London, where his rooms at 60
Lincoln's Inn Fields were the meeting-place of Tennyson, Thackeray,
FitzGerald, and any of his friends who happened to be in London at the
time.
"Spedding is just now furnishing chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields,"
FitzGerald writes in 1836, "so that we may look on him as a fixture in
London. He and I went to dine with Tennant at Blackheath last
Thursday: there we met Edgeworth, who has got a large house at Eltham,
and is lying in wait for pupils. I am afraid he will not find many. We
passed a very delightful evening."
His return from America after four months at Washington, led to his being
selected by the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ to write an article on
Dickens's _American Notes_, which gave the novelist strange and
unreasonable offence. Spedding had originally written, "He is understood
to have gone out as a kind of missionary in the cause of international
copyright," and this had been changed by the editor to "He went out, if we
are rightly informed, as a kind of missionary," etc. To this Dickens
writes in a towering passion, "I deny it wholly. He is wrongly informed,
and reports without enquiry, a piece of information which I could only
characterise by using one of the shortest and strongest words in the
language." And yet his letters show that, whether the subject of
international copyright were the real object of his visit or not, his
speeches on it are referred to with a kind of satisfaction as if they were
of the utmost importance. Apparently he was dissatisfied with the
impartial way in which Spedding distributed his praise and blame, praising
only where praise was due and blaming where it was not, and not
attributing too much value to the hasty results of a four months'
experience of the country.
But for several years Spedding had been a contributor to the _Edinburgh
Review_, and the articles which he selected for republication are full of
that calm wisdom which distinguished all that he wrote. In 1836 he
reviewed his friend Henry Taylor's _Statesman_; in 1838 he wrote on "Negro
Apprenticeship"; in 1839 on the "Suspension of the Jamaica Constitution";
in 1840 on the "Wakefield Theory of Colonization"; in 1841 on the
"Civilization of Africa and the Niger Expedition," in which his friend
John Allen lost a brother; and in 1842 on "South Australia in 1841," a
sequel to the article on the "Wakefield Theory of Colonization." And now
for the next thirty years of his life he devoted himself to the task of
what FitzGerald called washing his blackamoor, "a Tragedy pathetic as
Antigone or Iphigenia." His own special work was the arrangement of
Bacon's letters and minor writings, which had hitherto been very
carelessly edited, and for this purpose he spent his days among the
originals in the Lambeth Library and the British Museum. "Spedding devotes
his days to Lord Bacon in the British Museum," writes FitzGerald in 1844;
and again in 1846, "I saw very little of Spedding in London, for he was
out all day at State paper offices and Museums."
But he was not so absorbed in his special pursuits as not to take interest
in public affairs, and the Maynooth Grant in 1845 and the opposition
which it excited caused him to take part in an address to the Chancellor
of the Exchequer in its favour.
"You will see in the _Morning Herald_ of to-day," he writes to
Thompson, "that the great event has already taken place, and though
the world continues to move as it did, there does appear to be a
change of weather.