Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

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.