Moral Philosophy. Wilson tried for the post against Sir William
Hamilton. All the influence of a grateful and unscrupulous Tory
administration (that of Lord Liverpool, George IV.'s first Premier) was
exerted on his behalf, and they handled the unreformed City Corporation,
in whose appointment the Professorship lay, as voters in rotten boroughs
were then handled. John Wilson secured the chair, to the great scandal
of the other side, who truly pointed out that he had had no
philosophical training nor known bias to ethical studies, while his
previous life had given no evidence of his fitness to teach morals to
young men. As a matter of fact, however, this was a turning-point in his
own spiritual career. He took the advice of Sir Walter Scott to
'forswear sack, purge, and live cleanly like a gentleman.' He set
himself diligently to the study of his new subject, and mastered it. He
never published any system of Moral Philosophy. He has made no such mark
in the history of philosophy as did his great competitor. Yet, far
beyond almost any teacher of modern times, he achieved the highest of
all distinctions--that of being beloved, reverenced, almost idolized,
by generations of students during a term of thirty years, moulding and
shaping the lives of multitudes of public men and of those who create
the national welfare in schools and colleges, and filling them with
noble aspirations and ideals. His was a 'muscular Christianity,' taught
and practised long ere the term was invented and popularized.
His strenuous life was now, at the end of the thirty years of occupancy
of the chair, drawing to its close. A paralytic stroke obliged him to
resign. After a lingering time of gradual decay the fine spirit--erring,
repentant, forgiven, witnessing mightily for the higher and better side
of human nature--passed into a world of kindred souls, as he wished it
might, ''mid the blest stillness of a Sabbath day.'
THE PROFESSIONAL CRITIC
'Of all creatures that feed upon the earth, the professional critic
is the one whose judgment I least value for any purpose except
advertisement. But of all writers, the one whom he sits in judgment
on is also the one whom he is least qualified to assume a
superiority over. For is it likely that a man, who has written a
serious book about anything in the world, should not know more about
that thing than one who merely reads his book for the purpose of
reviewing it. But so it must be, and a discreet man must just let it
be. What I want to know is whether men and women and children who
care nothing about me, but take an intelligent interest in the
subject, find the book readable. What its other merits are nobody
knows so well as I.'--_A letter to Lord Tennyson by James Spedding._
XIII
THE CHAMPION OF LORD BACON
JAMES SPEDDING
'Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last;
The barren wilderness he pass'd,
Did on the very border stand
Of the blest promised land,
And from the mountain top of his exalted wit,
Saw it himself, and show'd us it.'
ABRAHAM COWLEY.
He was a 'Baconian specialist.' Specialists are seldom known to the
public, and seldom read, even when known by name, except by the chosen
few they write for. His life of the great philosopher and
essayist--Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, and Baron Verulam,
etc.--in seven volumes, is the standard biography. The fourteen
additional volumes of Bacon's works, edited by Spedding and two
coadjutors, is the standard edition of these. There is a smaller form of
the 'Life and Letters' in a couple of volumes--a condensation of the
completer edition--and also done by Spedding. He spent thirty years in
gathering materials, and putting them in order. 'Minute, accurate, and
dry,' his _magnum opus_ can never become popular; but it is exhaustive,
leaving nothing more to be said on the subject. It will be seen at once
what infinite pains he must have taken to perfect his self-imposed
task--how he must have searched, and searched again, in all available
libraries and depositories of old MSS., old letters, old records of
State and documents in private hands--how he must have written and
rewritten, added, struck out, and revised over and over during that long
period, as new facts cropped up or new views occurred to his mind. Says
Mrs. Lynn Linton of him: 'He was one who touched the crown of the ideal
student, whose justice of judgment was on a par with his sweetness of
nature, whose intellectual force was matched by his serenity, his
patience, his self-mastery, his purity.' There is another book of
his--'Evenings with a Reviewer'--written to defend Bacon from unfounded
aspersions on his character made by Macaulay, and by Pope at an earlier
period. This was originally printed for private circulation among a few
friends, and was not given to the world till after the decease of our
author. It is cast in the conversational form affected by Vaughan in his
'Hours with the Mystics,' by Smith, of Keswick, in 'Thorndale' and
'Gravenhurst,' and in similar works where it is desired that all sides
shall be fairly presented, and the whole of the issues involved
thoroughly thrashed out and carefully summed up.
It is confirming to those of us who remain sceptics in relation to the
Shakespeare-Bacon theory, and who believe 'The Great Cryptogram' to
exist only in some kink of the brain of its first exponent, and not in
any of Shakespeare's plays or poems, that so painstaking and minute an
investigator--one so utterly conversant with all that Bacon ever did or
wrote, one so familiar with his contemporaries and his age, even to the
analysis of the respective shares of Shakespeare and Fletcher in the
composition of 'Henry VIII.'--never seems to have for a moment suspected
any sort of literary co-partnership between the philosopher and the
actor.
Apart, however, from any questions of literature, and his high place
among its leading lights, James Spedding's personal character and his
association on terms of equality with the most eminent men of his day,
and the regard in which he was held by them, makes him an interesting
and important man of mark in the district--one whose memory should not
be allowed to die.
He was the son of a Cumberland squire living at Mirehouse, on
Bassenthwaite Water. The estate, lying on the eastern shore, is a little
north of where the River Derwent discharges itself into the lake, and at
the foot of mighty Skiddaw. Mirehouse Woods clothe the slopes of Skiddaw
Dodd. He was born in 1808, sent to school at Bury St. Edmunds, and
afterwards went to Cambridge University. At college he took no high
degree. He was, nevertheless, an eminent 'Apostle'--eloquent in debate,
though calm and unimpassioned. Does anyone ask who and what Cambridge
'Apostles' were? They were a band of ardent spirits among the
undergraduates, holding regular meetings, and often foregathering in
each others' rooms to discuss tobacco and coffee, and where, says
Carlyle in his 'Life of Sterling' (who was a member), 'was much logic
and other spiritual fencing, and ingenuous collision, probably of a
really superior quality in that kind, for not a few of the then
disputants have since proved themselves men of parts, and attained
distinction in the intellectual walks of life.' Besides Spedding and
Sterling, this genial circle of comrades included the Tennysons, Trench
(afterwards Archbishop), Arthur Hallam, Frederick Denison Maurice (the
founder of the club, and toasted as such at one of its annual dinners),
and many another of equal or little less fame--a band of youthful
friends who, as the future Laureate wrote, held debate
'On mind and art,
And labour and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land.'
Of Spedding himself Lord Tennyson wrote in later days: 'He was the Pope
among us young men--the wisest man I ever knew.' With this opinion
agrees the report of Caroline Fox as to a remark of Samuel Laurence, the
portrait painter: 'Spedding has the most beautiful combination of noble
qualities I ever met with.'
Leaving the University, James Spedding went, in 1835, into the Colonial
Office, under Sir Henry Taylor, author of 'Philip van Artevelde,' a
chief with tastes wholly congenial to those of his youthful subordinate.
During the time he remained in the Civil Service he went with Lord
Ashburton as travelling secretary to the Commission appointed to settle
the United States dispute with this nation as to the proper line of
their North-West boundary. He acquitted himself so ably in his
Government work that he was offered the post of an Under-Secretary of
State at a salary of £2,000 a year. This he refused in order to give
himself entirely to literature. Mr. Gladstone entertained the highest
opinion of his abilities and integrity, and greatly lamented his
decision not to serve his country in the post for which he was so
obviously fitted. Still later in life Mr. Gladstone tried to persuade
him to take the Professorship of History at Cambridge--a prospect which
had no more attractions for Spedding than Government officialism.
Spedding never married. He was wedded to his self-chosen life-work of
building up the standard biography of Bacon. He was, however, by no
means a man of one idea. He was an ardent Liberal in politics, and
during the awful upheaval of the European nations, about the middle of
last century, he became even a vehement partisan of the Hungarian
Revolution, and of Louis Kossuth and its other leaders. He was a votary
of Keats, and of Tennyson, the latter staying with him twice at
Mirehouse. He was an ardent admirer of the celebrated Jenny Lind, the
'Swedish Nightingale.' He was also an advocate of phonetic 'reform,' as
it was called, not merely, it is to be feared, for the sake of promoting
the study and commercial use of shorthand reporting, but with the view
of actually changing the orthography of our ancient language. With all
its difficulties and peculiarities, one would have felt lasting regret
had he and his coadjutors succeeded in their raid on our historical and
ethnological inheritance in the English spelling-book. He was,
furthermore, a careful student of handwriting. The last-named study was
necessitated by his continuous poring over the MSS. relating to his
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century investigations.
Some people who had observed Spedding's patient and leisurely methods of
study, and his calmness and deliberation of thought and verbal
expression, considered him of a lazy disposition, and as strangely
lacking in energy. This was an erroneous judgment. He was certainly
cautious, because acute in noticing details, and refused to commit
himself without due, and perhaps sometimes undue, premeditation, but he
frequently assumed purposely an air of ignorance when he was merely
endeavouring to draw others out, and he was fond of adopting the
Socratic method with those whom he conversed, in order to get at the
bottom of them, or of the subject under discussion. His memory was an
exceedingly retentive one. To a friend he writes: 'I have no copy of
"The Palace of Art," but when you come I shall be happy to repeat it to
you.' Readers of Tennyson know that this poem contains seventy-four
stanzas, besides the prelude to it. He was, like so many others in this
series, a contributor to _Blackwood_, and to the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Gentleman's Magazine_ as well. In the _Edinburgh_ he reviewed
Tennyson's first book with discrimination and with appreciation.
The chief fascination about Spedding, I say again, was undoubtedly his
commanding personality and his abiding comradeship with the greatest men
of genius among his contemporaries. Such diverse characters as James
Anthony Froude and Edward Fitzgerald were among his intimates. He was
with Froude on that historian's first visit to Thomas Carlyle, and
Fitzgerald called to see him in the hospital where he died. It was in
1881 that he was knocked down by a cab in London, and carried to St.
George's. On his death-bed, says Fitzgerald, he was 'all patience,'
refusing to hear the cabman blamed, and, indeed, fully exonerating him.
When Spedding's brother died, the friend of them both, Alfred Tennyson,
wrote to James in touching sympathy with his loss, a noble poem which,
in the volume, is inscribed simply 'To J. S.' The last two verses may
fitly conclude this sketch, for they apply as much to one brother as to
the other:
'Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace;
Sleep, holy spirit, tender soul,
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll.
Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet,
Nothing comes to thee new or strange;
Sleep full of rest from head to feet--
Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.'
THE BLESSING OF A FULL LIFE
'Deep streams run still, and why? Not because there are no
obstructions, but because they altogether overflow those stones or
rocks round which the shallow stream has to make its noisy way. 'Tis
the full life that saves us from the little noisy troubles of
life.'--WILLIAM SMITH.
* * * * *
'So when our complaining
Tells of constant strife
With some moveless hindrance
In our path of life,
'What we need is only
Fulness of our own.
If the current deepen,
Never mind the stone!
'Let the fuller nature
Flow its mass above;
Cover it with pity,
Cover it with love.'
LUCY SMITH.
XIV
TWO BEAUTIFUL LIVES
WILLIAM AND LUCY SMITH
'As unto the bow the cord is,
So unto the man is woman,
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows.
Useless each without the other.'
LONGFELLOW'S _Hiawatha_.
Two rarely beautiful lives were theirs--close-welded, and thereby each
sharing and each doubling the beauty of the other. Their beauty was
spiritual, intellectual, influential.
William sprang from the mercantile classes of the Metropolis--from a
race of evangelical Free Churchmen of such liberal leanings as to throw
no obstacle in his way of becoming a theological and metaphysical
thinker of a decidedly 'advanced' type; while an elder brother became an
eloquent Episcopalian preacher at the celebrated Temple Church.
Lucy, whose maiden name was Cummings, was the daughter of a medical man
who had married a lady socially superior to himself, and was brought up
by her parents in an atmosphere of 'Welsh Calvinism.'
William was a shy, sensitive boy and lad, learning quickly, given to
introspection, and taking a high place in his schools. His university
life was spent at Glasgow--Oxford and Cambridge being at that time (the
late forties of last century) closed against all except Anglicans--and
there his mental bias towards philosophy was strengthened and developed,
especially by the teaching of Dr. Chalmers. From college he was sent to
study law under the well-known author, Sharon Turner. This study he
cordially detested, yet in after-years he confessed that compulsory
training for the Bar had invigorated and disciplined his reasoning
powers to a degree he learned to be grateful for. Some travels abroad,
too, though at a later period--notably to Italy--matured his character
and widened his outlook. His first literary efforts were articles which
were accepted by the _Athenæum_, then just started. In that paper, and
in _Blackwood_ (is it not singular that most of our Lake celebrities
were contributors to 'Old Ebony'?) he had frequent enough insertions to
earn thereby a modest income--small, but sure, and sufficient for the
limited needs of a quiet-living single man. For years he followed the
career of an essayist and reviewer, pondering deeply meanwhile problems
that seem to admit of no definite solution during the present
limitations of human knowledge--problems which have bewildered
Christians and non-Christians alike for centuries past, and, if Milton's
authority may be relied upon, even the fallen principalities and powers
in Hades--'Fixed Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute'--the origin of
evil, the eternal duration of sin's consequences, the nature of sin
itself, the possibility of finding and knowing God, the attainment of
final certitude on any question other than mathematical, the relation of
revealed or natural religion to science, the unalterable reign of law in
mental and moral as well as in physical regions--these, and many similar
enigmas, whirled perpetually through his brain, and would not rest till
at least an honest attempt had been made to solve them. The necessity
that appeared to be laid on him to discover answers to the practically
unanswerable induced a habit of seclusion and a shrinking from any
society that might interrupt the flow of speculative thought. He would
pass people in the streets and the country roads absolutely without
seeing them; and though cheerful and apt in conversation when obliged to
meet his fellows, he invariably preferred to be alone on long mountain
walks that he might think his own thoughts, and by meditation work out
his difficulties, and record in his MSS. for future publication the
conclusions he had arrived at, even though those conclusions amounted to
no more than that none could be attained to! It was while residing in
solitary seclusion, first at sunny Bowness upon Windermere Lake and then
across the watershed at Keswick, on the rainier side of the mountains,
that his great books 'Thorndale' and 'Gravenhurst' were wrought in the
secret recesses of his soul. The first, the sub-title of which is 'The
Conflict of Opinion,' is constructed on the conversational model, as,
indeed, is the second also. Materialist, Roman Catholic, Theist, or
Unitarian, and Scientific Evolutionist, all are heard with fairness and
courtesy, and the discussions are intensely interesting to readers with
thoughtful minds. But there is, after all has been said that can be
said, nothing more than an open verdict returned on the highest themes
that can occupy human attention. There is no more settlement of any of
the vast questions debated for the inquirer who has discarded Divine
revelation than for him who accepts it in whole or in part.
'Gravenhurst' has for a secondary title 'Knowing and Feeling: a
Contribution to Psychology.' So far as it leads us to an end that end
seems hardly distinguishable from the Eastern 'Necessitarianism,' or
'Fatalism,' in which all metaphysicians sooner or later engulf us who
get rid of human responsibility for sin and its consequences by making
the Creator the author of both moral and material evil. Yet the
conclusions are logical if only certain premises are granted. Both books
are crowded with sweet and helpful thoughts--wayside flowers of
brilliancy and fragrancy, the gathering of which may easily lure the
reader from the watchfulness needed in travelling along these winding
roads, so destitute of authoritative sign-posts; the sign-posts erected
by previous explorers having been cut down by more modern pedestrians,
because, forsooth! the painted directions were faded, and they had no
brush wherewith to freshen them!
While William was thus developing his life-work and weaving his
intellectual robes, Lucy was growing into her charming womanhood amid
the happy surroundings of her home in North Wales, and evolving the
noblest of characters through self-denial and loving devotion to others.
As a girl she was highly educated. When past her girlhood she proved a
handsome and cultured lady, sought in marriage by at least two men, both
of whose offers she refused, but neither of whom espoused any other. She
remained single that she might help retrieve the fortunes of her
parents, which had become so reduced that the house endeared to them by
long residence had to be sold, and her own little patrimony given up to
the clearance of debt. The broken father and mother were thenceforth
tended, and, indeed, partly supported, by Lucy, who earned something by
making translations from German, and in similar ways, till she lost them
both in one sad week.
It was by an apparent chance, though by a very real providence of God,
that these two met, William Smith and Lucy Cummings, while mother and
daughter were in one set of apartments of a Keswick lodging-house, and
'Thorndale Smith,' as he came to be called, in an upper. A pleasant
comradeship began on purely literary matters, and ripened into warm
friendship, and frequent correspondence after parting for the season,
till they met again some time afterwards at Patterdale. Then it was that
friendship suddenly sprang upwards into the unique form of love most
exquisitely portrayed in the ideal biography written of her husband by
Lucy, after his premature decease. This biography was written originally
for private circulation among her friends, and was afterwards attached,
as a preface, to a new edition of 'Gravenhurst.' It is one of the most
lovely stories of wedded life in our English tongue. All that poets have
imagined of 'The Angel of the House,' of love's wealth, of love's
visions, of 'Love's Young Dream,' seem to have been realized in the
experiences of these kindred souls, brought together at a later period
in life than most people enter on the married state. After a period of
unalloyed happiness William's health began to fail, and a long time of
anxious watching fell to Lucy Smith. Still was their talk ever of higher
things and of the deeper problems of life and humanity. Despite his
assumed negative position with regard to much that Christians hold to be
essential truth, there was an undercurrent of devout belief in God left
in William's heart, as is evidenced by lines in his verses, as for
example:
'Earth can be earth, yet rise
Into the region of God's dwelling-place
If Light and Love are what we call His skies.'
In his 'Athelwood,' too--a tragedy, set on the stage and played by
Macready and Helen Faucit--there are passages, notably those put into
the mouth of Dunston, which show the same thing:
'God, where art Thou?
I call for Thee, they give me but a world,
Thy mechanism; I call aloud for Thee,
My Father, Friend, Sustainer, Teacher, Judge.'
Still more remarkable was his impromptu acknowledgment when he lay
dying, and his wife, referring to some of his published views, said:
'William, such love as mine for you cannot be the result of mere
mechanism or vital forces, can it?' 'Oh, no,' he responded; 'it has a
far higher source.' 'Once,' adds his wife, 'I saw the hands clasped as
in a speechless communion with the Unseen, and twice I caught the solemn
word "God" uttered, not in a tone of appeal or entreaty, but as if the
supreme contemplation which had been his very life meant more, revealed
more, than ever!' In a former article I pointed out how seldom
professed, and even perfectly sincere, doubters ever entirely shake off
the impressions of Divine reality and the Divine Presence. My own
conviction is that the God whom they seek (I am not thinking of the
unbelief that springs from moral unfaithfulness or obliquity) does,
after all, touch their hands in the darkness, and the Christ whom they
fail to understand has included them in His great and universal
atonement. It may be that the Holy Spirit, who shows the things of
Christ to men, gives them a saving view of Calvary as they pass through
the Valley of the Shadow. I cannot believe that any _bonâ fide_ seeker
after God ever became a 'lost soul' in any sense of those awful words,
even though his seeking endured for a lifetime without conscious
finding.