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There were, indeed, and had long been experimental philosophers, but the school doctors went not beyond Aristotle; and discovered nothing. As Mr. Spedding puts it, the boy Bacon asked himself, "If our study of nature be thus barren, our method of study must be wrong; might not a better method be found? . . . Upon the conviction 'This may be done, followed at once the question, HOW may it be done?
Spedding, Bacon's biographer, "to understand why Bacon was resolved not to devote his life to the ordinary practice of a lawyer, than what plan he had to clear himself of the difficulties which were now accumulating upon him, and to obtain the means of living and working. What course he betook himself to at the crisis at which we have now arrived, I cannot possibly say."
One remembers the description which FitzGerald gave of the labours of his friend Spedding upon Bacon. Spedding gave up the whole of his life, said FitzGerald, to editing works which did not need editing, and to whitewashing a character which could not be whitewashed.
Uniting the scientific habit of mind with the literary art, he showed that truthfulness need not be bald, and that power lies rather in accuracy than in luxuriance of diction. As to the influence which such a style exerted on the habit of mind of his readers, there is remarkable testimony in a letter from Spedding, the editor of Bacon, printed in the Life of Huxley, ii, 239.
These were the days before the researches of Spedding, when Bacon was supposed to be a mass of those impossible paradoxes in which Macaulay delighted. To Morris, Bacon's Submission and his renunciation of all defence were sufficient. With what pathos he repeated Bacon's words when the Lords asked him whether the subscription to the Submission was in his own hand.
The year 1881 brought the death of another of the old Cambridge friends, James Spedding, the biographer of Bacon; and Carlyle also died, a true friend, if rather intermittent in his appreciation of poetry. The real Carlyle did appreciate it, but the Carlyle of attitude was too much of the iron Covenanter to express what he felt.
Spedding, his senior by a score of years, describes the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have produced the same effect upon him.
These, after all, are realities to you as much as ideas were to Plato, or music to Beethoven, or patriotism to Washington. Deny these as the higher certitudes, and you rob the soul of its dignity, and life of its consolations. Bacon's Works, edited by Basil Montagu; Bacon's Life, by Basil Montagu; Bacon's Life, by James Spedding; Bacon's Life, by Thomas Fowler; Dr.
Kinglake entered at Trinity, Cambridge, in 1828, among an exceptionally brilliant set Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, John Sterling, Trench, Spedding, Spring Rice, Charles Buller, Maurice, Monckton Milnes, J. M. Kemble, Brookfield, Thompson. With none of them does he seem in his undergraduate days to have been intimate.
He also began, in a mood of great misery, The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834, when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautiful Sir Galahad, "intended for something of a male counterpart to St Agnes." The Morte d'Arthur Tennyson then thought "the best thing I have managed lately."
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