Tennyson and His Friends Part 42

If the proceedings of the day are to be published in a pamphlet, I should like to invest money in a few copies. If not, I shall think about printing your part of them in a legible shape on my own account.... G. Farish is going to Madeira, with Sterling, I believe.

James F. speaks hopefully of the latter, but is more alarmed about his brother.

In a letter to Allen we get a glimpse of Tennyson:

Alfred Tennyson has reappeared, and is going to-day or to-morrow to Florence, or to Killarney, or to Madeira, or to some place where some ship is going--he does not know where. He has been on a visit to a madhouse for the last fortnight (not as a patient), and has been delighted with the mad people, whom he reports the most agreeable and the most reasonable persons he has met with. The keeper is Dr. Allen (any relation of yours?), with whom he had been greatly taken!

Again writing to Thompson in October 1840 he says:

I have been studying Alfred Tennyson's MSS., and I send you a copy of a poem which I think he once repeated to you and me, and which we neither of us much entered into. Reading it again the other day, I was surprised with the power and beauty of it, and I now think it wants nothing but a better name, or, I should rather say, a historical foundation. I would have it put into the mouth of some noted man (among the many such that must have been) involved in a marriage which he does not like, in violation of a pre-existing attachment. The imagining of such situations for the mere purpose of entering into the feelings which belong to them has something unwholesome in it, to my fancy; but the situation being given (whether in fact or fiction), there is no harm in turning it into poetry.

In 1840 Lord Lyndhurst was a candidate for the office of High Steward of the University of Cambridge in opposition to Lord Lyttelton. Spedding voted for the latter.

"I went down to Cambridge," he writes to Thompson, "to support Lord Lyttelton in his late distinguished defeat, of which you have, of course, heard all particulars with apostolic embellishments and ill.u.s.trations both from other apostolic souls and from Merivale. I have been happy in being able in these trying circ.u.mstances 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 const.i.tuency 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 mult.i.tude, 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 mult.i.tude, 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 _Bened.i.c.k_ 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 pa.s.s, 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 n.o.body 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 c.h.i.n.k 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 pa.s.s. 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 Academic.u.m, 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 ill.u.s.trate. 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 pa.s.s, 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 b.u.t.ting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an alt.i.tude; 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 Emba.s.sy would tell you otherwise. I should not wonder if the whole theory of the Emba.s.sy, 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 attaches.

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 pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.kens'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 d.i.c.kens writes in a towering pa.s.sion, "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 Const.i.tution"; 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.

"We had only 300 names. But that was quite enough, considering all things, especially the respectability of the people, and the imperfection of the agitation, to make the address well worth presenting. Having gone so far, to hold back altogether would have been to confess that the attempt was a mere failure, which n.o.body can say it was. To hold it back past the time specified in the circulars and originally designed, for the chance of obtaining more signatures, would have been useless: people would have only said that though we boasted of the shortness of the time in which the signatures were collected, yet in fact we waited as long as there was any chance of gathering any more. And in point of fact they had begun to come in very slowly by Monday morning. At best, it could not have been improved into an effectual canva.s.s, and as it is, it shows very well.

Let any one put the two lists side by side, and then say, if the weight of opinion in Cambridge inclines one way, which way is it? I was doubtful of the expediency of stirring it at first, but I am now very glad that it has been done. I wish the _Herald_ had printed the names. But it was an unlucky day, there being a great debate in both Houses.

"Hare declined presenting; upon which H. Lushington, Venables, Micklethwaite, and myself (who had, in fact, been the chief actors), distributed ourselves into two cabs: and drove slap up to the Chancellor of Exchequer's. Harry Lushington was the chief speaker, and did it very well and gracefully. Goulburn was, of course, gracious, but I should hardly have inferred that he was glad. However, he said he was; glad that this had been done, and glad that no more had been done; and (upon the whole) easy about the matter. The fever (he said) appeared to be gradually subsiding, and indeed the opposition was less formidable than might be supposed. 'From what the gentleman said who presented the address on the other side, he gathered that it was for the most part a _conscientious_ opposition, not arising from any political animosity.' Certainly _Punch_ cannot be said to beat Nature."

Nothing, however, diverted him from his great object. FitzGerald writes to Frederick Tennyson:

Spedding, you know, does not change: he is now the same that he was fourteen years old when I first knew him at school, more than twenty years ago; wise, calm, bald, combining the best qualities of Youth and Age.

But his calmness was not proof against the enthusiasm created by the advent of Jenny Lind in 1847. Again FitzGerald writes:

All the world has been, as I suppose you have read, crazy about Jenny Lind.... Spedding's cool blood was moved to hire stalls several times at an advanced rate.... I have never yet heard the famous Jenny Lind, whom all the world raves about. Spedding is especially mad about her, I understand: and, after that, is it not best for weaker vessels to keep out of her way? Night after night is that bald head seen in one particular position in the Opera house, in a stall; the miserable man has forgot Bacon and philosophy, and goes after strange women.