From Hector Tyndale   27 September 1855

Philadelphia | 27 September 1855

My dear John

Thank you for the letter¹ you dated to me just this day two months ago. Two months ago! Why in those two months we have travelled through and over ‘all creation’, as we yankees are said to say. We have gone with our egotisms² to the very source of all egoisms and pulled the beards of holy spirits sitting high in the eternal senate of Heaven. We have in those two months dived or climbed, whichever it may be, to the center of ourselves, and yet, strange to say, here we stand to day not a whit in advance of the position we had just two months ago! The telegraphic magnet speed is slow and wearisome in contrast with the rate at which we have rushed unwearied through the infinite space of self-consciousness. We have spoken, or dreamed that we have spoken (and is not that the same thing to us?) face to face with the Holiest, and yet here sit we writing by a light, the mere sunlight, a visible, physical thing, a decomposable compound more strange and more unknown to us than the great Universum³ we have measured accurately within those two months. Here after two months of self converse; that is of universal egotistic converse with the highest and holiest we know, I sit down with face as blank and head as empty as before, to converse with you by brain talk and inky symbols! Why are we tied down by hands and pens and muddled brains when we desire and command that we may speak untramelled and unwearied by these slow contrivances? Oh were we not thus tied what worlds of flame and light and beauty we would send through eager space; what planetary bubbles, refracting the light of source and destiny, flooding dark chaos with light and awakening dead void to the new rapture of the sense of Light. Ah John what grand fireworks we should have, you and I and more of us, in this grand Versailles of imperial egotism –

But prithee stop me John with some forceful fact, check my wheels with a brick from the great edifice of science you are building or I may go bump into the middle of your egotism and make ‘a smash’ when I intended only to shake your hands.

There John I let it go, the most tiresome long straw in the wind blowing hereaway – Is it not an adverse trade wind?

Thank you again my dear fellow for your kind sympathy with me in my ‘chronic indifference’.⁴ You have been bored more than enough, before and now herein, with my gloomy egotism, and I cannot as a Christian man call on you again ‘for dear charity’s sake’.

I wish – please notice how often I wish – I had been with you and Debus in your walk through Normandy.⁵ Consciousness would then have been content with existence – and contentment is health is it not? What pleasure to be thus free and careless of hours and rules made by rail road managers and respectable others. How capital the cider, the beer or the vin ordinaire⁶ and the bread. How they seemed to assimilate with ourselves and to be the very thing we needed unconsciously – ah beautiful idea – angel symbolized by un-consciousness. The Sun, not so bright perhaps, the sky, not so clear may be, as these now over my head, but bright and clear and joy making. Yellow fields and green meadows border all the roads and birds singing everywhere on the summer clad trees. Clear vision and springey muscles, quiet soul and happy heart, easy mind and glorious health all come in from such a walk. Hail to you road-walker, Nature seeker, long may you live in power of health and strength and in the beatitude of Existence – pur et simple.⁷ These things come not to every man, certainly not to every man here, and it is, perhaps, as much to this non-come-at-a-bility as to anything else that these walks seem so pleasant to me – The Sun, you know, lingers longest on the farthest cloud. Please present my kindest respects to Mr Debus. I have met here Mr Genth⁸ – chemist – who is acquainted with him, having, I believe, been a fellow student with him under Bunsen. To Dr: Francis and to Dr: Coxe, should you see or write to the latter, please make my remembrances & respects.

Thank you for the ‘Bakerian lecture’⁹ I have read it with much pleasure, and though it is, perhaps, somewhat too technical for me to grasp in all the experimental details I still can easily and clearly follow you in all your ratiocination. ‘Ye hev a way wid ye yer Honor’¹⁰ of saying things very simply and clearly, that is very pleasant to a reader and when I come to study Physics I shall apply to you – Mind that.

You say ‘I wish to Heaven you could abolish my right to be unwell.’ Certainly I don’t wish to destroy any right you may have – I being a very liberal believer in free will – but if you would piously walk more, take more breathings from the lips of the Nature you love so well; if in these pilgrimages, holy and religious, you would worship in companionship of a Saint or ordained priest of the Great Church, then the world of your Nature would become green, fresh and strong again (par parentheses the blind have led the halt before¹¹ so please excuse this) But I will on. ‘You have no right to be sick’ I have already said so; but it is of another kind of right I spoke. You have no such right taking Right as the opposite of Wrong, though you have it certainly, understood as an act of your own unrelated Will and as an eccentric privilege of that alone. Your avocation, and it is your part of ordained labour, is in accord with your desires, it is attractive to you. Nothing in it clashes or discords your harmony. You seek it as a pleasure while it serves you in acquittance of the labour required of you. Such I have no doubt is the intention of the law of labour, but this unrelated Will of Man has made labour seem a curse.

You say with much truth ‘the only plan that I have ever found effectual in finding the right sphere of action is to do the duty nearest at hand.’ But the difficulty is to find the ‘nearest duty’. Or if that is found and done then the next nearest and the next until the search for duties becomes the vocation of the life, the labour of life, pleasant in itself, but empty of returns, perhaps, for the physical well being of those around us. Is civilization, in all it’s demands for art and sensual surroundings, advantageous after all? But away with Metaphysics, defined by some one as ‘whatever is not understand-able’. I will say only, and you may guess the rest if you will or deny the whole, he gains no honours nor reaps glory and he sleeps no satisfied sleep who lags rearward, whether from cowardice, laziness or inability. But he still preserves his right to grumble, to sickness and to discontent! At least these are not denied him and these at last become his pleasures, as was that of the overthrown rebel Titans¹² the belching of stinking fumes against the Heavens and the Great Victor Gods. This is very sad, but the rebellion goes on for ever. I have gained much satisfaction, inductively, from your lecture on ‘the diamagnetic force’.¹³ You have proved that Matter has resident force and is not wholly and imperatively influenced by external powers; e.g. paramagnetic and dia-magnetic actions arise from the force resident in the subjected matter, that the matter itself defines its own action and direction under the neutral or indifferent powers of the magnet <word(s) missing> fact, my dear John, goes a great way towards reconciling me with myself! <word(s) missing> as a ‘laissez faire’!¹⁴ and opposite as I may be to myself, I still may <word(s) missing> reconcile it as a Natural, and therefore, I hope, beneficial opposition. Oh for a downright, steadfast opposition, or for a faithful, hearty, concurrent Spirit. Either would be preferable, perhaps, to a mixt spirit, neither ‘black’ nor ‘white’ but only a mongrel ‘grey’?

I am glad you have seen the great Exposition of Paris,¹⁵ it must be glorious to see such an aggregation of concrete ideas. The London Exhibition of 1851¹⁶ was grand and I doubt whether the French one is more grand, though I can readily believe there is more taste and higher art in the paintings & sculpture.

Bloody news from the Crimea.¹⁷ Great havoc of Russian self love. Damaged Souls went to the Styx¹⁸ border from thousands of butchered bodies. Even strong Will was broken when Sebastopol fell.¹⁹ I am glad of it though looking at such ghastly sights is not gladdening generally. Would that Liberty and what Jesus and all great souls have fought for may be brought nearer to men from this bloody war. Let us wait & see.

You and I may differ much on forms of government perhaps, but I can conceive of no difference in the Great End desired.²⁰ It is not, it cannot be that this gory war is waged alone for Britain, or for France or even for poor, wretched Turkey. There must be, by God ordained, something behind and above the flaunting rags of nationality, and a nobler enthusiasm than is expressed in the hoarse cries of selfish laudation. Why are not armies clothed in the deepest mourning, as undertakers, who for the health of living souls bury out of sight and sense the dead bodies of lies and ancient tyrannies; whose business it is to ingrave old man of the mountain tradition²¹ and all humbug, fiddling Neros.²² Why do we not shout as gleefully to the successful body burier as to conquering armies? Let us shout in God’s name but not in Moseses!²³ Let us recognise the Victor whose body closes the yawning chasm. But let us not offend the Gods by brutal shouts coming from the bull ring and fitting enough for that. I fear however that the Spaniards do but act out the Matadore (or whatever his bull fighting name may be) who lives in the nature of all humanity. I who wrestle with the Gods and Angels, shall I gloat and glory over running blood whether shed by bulls or men? ‘I, the foremost child of all the ages’,²⁴ ‘I to mate with squalid savage’²⁵ sang Tennyson then, how sings he now? – Enough, drag away the dead bulls and men, by gaily apparelled asses, to the sound of livelier music than those miserable groans of mine can make.

Mr Leland of this city has made, what is said to be, a very good translation of the ‘Travel pictures’ – of ‘the witty & wicked Heine’.²⁶ It is published here in numbers and thinking you might like to see it I have directed the publishers here to send you the numbers as they are published, their house in London is Trübner & Co No 12 Paternoster Row. They will send it to you²⁷ as directed, no doubt, if they do not then please send for it, if you think it worth while to read. Heine is certainly witty, but it is wine wit mostly I apprehend. Pray excuse me for sending it, for I do not mean thereby any opinion upon your taste, for after all he is quite readable & funny. Do write soon to me and often as you can find time and I if I do not always respond as promptly as might be, attribute it to my moods & tenses.

And now my dear John I wind up the broken ends of my talk with you by sending the unknown remembrances of all my family, our family here to you, and by recommending your heart to that rare and radiant maiden,²⁸ your body to the roads and hill tops, your conceptive soul to the great views of Earth and Heaven to be seen only from those hill tops, and your kind memories to me. Good bye and take of your health here as you hope to go ‘to a better place hereafter’.

affectionately yours | Hector Tyndale

RI MS JT/1/T/48