Was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1831, being placed in the second class in classics, and among the junior optimes in mathematics, and became an honorary fellow of his college. His uneventful life was devoted to research, especially to the study of Bacon’s life and works. His edition of Bacon’s works, projected in 1874, was undertaken in conjunction with Mr. R. L. Ellis. Mr. Ellis, however, died before the completion of the “Novum Organum,” and with the exception of occasional help from Mr. D. D. Heath, Mr. Spedding was left to carry on the work alone. The edition began to appear in 1857, and was finished in seven volumes. Then followed the “Life and Letters” of Bacon, completed in 1876. Spedding’s edition is the only complete edition of Bacon, and is enriched with most valuable notes. In his “Life” of this great philosopher, too, every scrap of information is collected together; it is to this source that every future biographer of Bacon must refer. Mr. Spedding met his death from injuries inflicted by a cab, the approach of which, on account of his deafness, he had not heard. His minor works include:—“Publishers and Authors” (1867); “Reviews and Discussions not Relating to Bacon” (1869); “Evenings with a Reviewer, or Macaulay and Bacon” (1882); and some “Studies in English History,” written in conjunction with Mr. J. Gairdner.
Personal
Does the thought ever strike you, when looking at pictures in a house, that you are to run and jump at one, and go right through it into some behind-scene world on the other side, as Harlequins do? A steady portrait especially invites one to do so: the quietude of it ironically tempts one to outrage it: one feels it would close again over the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened. That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me: 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. The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe: or Glamorganshire: or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has gone to spend its Christmas there.
His success both in his own college and in the University examinations would have been more brilliant if he had possessed the gift of rapid composition and translation. It was his nature to be in all things deliberate; and he was neither willing nor able to struggle against his characteristic temperament. At a later period of his life he gave as a reason for declining a high appointment in the public service, that he should have found it intolerable to turn his attention to ten or twenty unconnected matters in the course of a single day. His power of sustained labour has rarely been surpassed, but in his intellect and his temperament there was no versatility…. No member of the well-known society of Cambridge apostles was more heartily respected and beloved by his many friends within and without that body. The manner which faithfully represented his disposition was already formed, and it never afterwards varied. Calm and unimpassioned, he contributed his full share to conversation in a musical voice which never rose above its ordinary pitch. The ready smile with which he welcomed humorous or amusing remarks was singularly winning. His imperturbable good temper might have seemed more meritorious, if it had been possible to test his equanimity by treating him with negligence or harshness. The just impression of wisdom which was produced by his voice, his manner, and the substance of his conversation, was well described in the form of humorous exaggeration by one of the acutest and most brilliant women of his time, Harriet, the second Lady Ashburton. Lord Houghton, in his “Monographs,” quotes her as saying, “I always feel a kind of average between myself and any other person I am talking with—between us two, I mean; so that when I am talking to Spedding I am unutterably foolish—beyond permission.”
He was the wisest man I have known: not the less so for plenty of the Boy in him; a great sense of Humour, a Socrates in Life and in Death, which he faced with all Serenity so long as Consciousness lasted.
The admirable Spedding, who drew all good and great men unto him, but to converse with whom, in consequence of his deliberate utterance, required an ampler leisure than even I, who am neither good nor great, found always practicable.
Life and Works of Bacon, 1848–76
I am delighted and interested in a most high degree by the vindication of Bacon. It seems to me no less admirable for the principles of moral discrimination and truth and accuracy of statement, especially where character is concerned, which it brings out and elucidates by particular instances, which, as it were, substantiate and vitalize the abstract propositions, than for the glorious sunny light which it casts on the character of Bacon. Then how ably does it show up, not Macaulay’s character individually and personally, so much as the class of thinkers of which he is the mouthpiece and representative.
The lie, it may be hoped, is about to pass away. An editor worthy of Bacon has risen to purge his fame. Such labors as those undertaken by Mr. Spedding demand a life, and he has not scrupled to devote the best years of an active and learned manhood to the preliminary toil…. The instinct, strong as virtue, to reject the spume of satire and falsehood, has sprung at the voice of Mr. Spedding into lusty life.
It is not merely that his contribution to English history has no rival for accuracy of judgment, and for industry carried to the extreme point; or that he has taught us to know in his true character one of the greatest statesmen of a land fertile in statesmenship. His book is more than a history, more than a biography. It is a moral school, teaching historical writers to combat the sin which most easily besets them, the tendency to put their own interpretation upon doubtful facts, and their own thoughts into the minds of men of other ages.
Mr. Spedding says his object was to enable posterity to “form a true conception of the kind of man Bacon was,” and accordingly he gives an unusually full record of a more than unusually full life. The question of legal guilt Bacon himself admitted. The moral culpability Mr. Spedding does not consider so clear, considering the corrupt practices of the age, and the philosopher’s carelessness as to money and household management.
In the opinion of competent judges, Mr. Spedding was second to none of his contemporaries in power of reasoning, in critical sagacity, or in graceful purity of style; nor had he any superior in conscientious industry. No one has hitherto possessed so complete a knowledge of the subject to which his life was chiefly devoted; and it is improbable that future students should throw additional light on the career and character of Bacon. In the course of his indefatigable researches, Mr. Spedding deduced many independent and original conclusions from the profound familiarity which he had acquired with the history of the time…. No more conscientious, no more sagacious critic has employed on a not unworthy task the labour of a life. It will be well, rather for students of history and of character than for himself, if his just fame is rescued from the neglect which he regarded with unaffected indifference.
To re-edit his Works, which did not want any such re-edition, and to vindicate his Character which could not be cleared, did this Spedding sacrifice forty years which he might well have given to accomplish much greater things.
The work to which he gave his life is a work of great labor, a work of great love, and a work which will be a lantern unto the feet and a light unto the paths of many generations of mankind—of as many as shall care to look back to the greatest secondary cause of their being what, in the progress of science and discovery, they shall have become.
Spedding’s great work, the result of a life’s devoted research, remains the source from which all commentators must draw their information; but few will wade through such a mass of material set forth with so little art. Mr. Spedding’s plan of arranging events, as in an annual register, under the years in which they happened, detracts from the interest if not from the value of his labours. He has left a quarry from which others must hew.
The work is an unsurpassable model of thorough and scholar-like editing. Taylor reports that about 1863 Spedding showed signs of declining interest in his task, but recovered after a long rest. His unflagging industry had made him familiar with every possible source of information, and his own writing is everywhere marked by slow but sure-footed judgment, and most careful balancing of evidence. Spedding’s qualities are in curious contrast with Macaulay’s brilliant audacity, and yet the trenchant exposure of Macaulay’s misrepresentations is accompanied by a quiet humour and a shrewd critical faculty which, to a careful reader, make the book more interesting than its rival. Critics have thought Spedding’s judgment of his hero too favourable, but on one doubts that his views require the most respectful consideration.
