Volume Ii Part 29 (1/2)
FAREWELL TO CHARLES d.i.c.kENS
[Speech of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton at a farewell banquet given to Charles d.i.c.kens, London, November 2, 1867, prior to his departure on a reading tour in the United States. In giving the toast of the evening, Lord Lytton, the chairman, delivered the following speech.]
MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I now approach the toast which is special to the occasion that has brought together a meeting so numerous and so singularly distinguished. You have paid the customary honors to our beloved sovereign, due not only to her personal virtues, but to that principle of const.i.tutional monarchy in which the communities of Europe recognize the happiest mode of uniting liberty with order, and giving to the aspirations for the future a definite starting-point in the experience and the habits of the past. You are now invited to do honor to a different kind of royalty, which is seldom peacefully acknowledged until he who wins and adorns it ceases to exist in the body, and is no longer conscious of the empire which his thoughts bequeath to his name.
Happy is the man who makes clear his t.i.tle-deeds to the royalty of genius while he yet lives to enjoy the grat.i.tude and reverence of those whom he has subjected to his sway. Though it is by conquest that he achieves his throne, he at least is a conqueror whom the conquered bless; and the more despotically he enthralls, the dearer he becomes to the hearts of men.
Seldom, I say, has that kind of royalty been quietly conceded to any man of genius until his tomb becomes his throne, and yet there is not one of us now present who thinks it strange that it is granted without a murmur to the guest whom we receive to-night. It has been said by a Roman poet that Nature, designing to distinguish the human race from the inferior animals by that faculty of social progress which makes each combine with each for the aid and defence of all, gave to men _mollissima corda_,--hearts the most accessible to sympathy with their fellow kind; and hence tears,--and permit me to add, and hence laughter,--became the special and the n.o.blest attributes of humanity. Therefore it is humanity itself which obeys an irresistible instinct when it renders homage to one who refines it by tears that never enfeeble, and by a laughter that never degrades.
You know that we are about to intrust our honored countryman to the hospitality of those kindred sh.o.r.es in which his writings are as much ”household words” as they are in the homes of England. And if I may presume to speak as a politician, I should say that no time could be more happily chosen for his visit; because our American kinsfolk have conceived, rightly or wrongfully, that they have some cause of complaint against ourselves, and out of all England we could not have selected an envoy more calculated to allay irritation and to propitiate good-will.
In the matter of good-will there is a distinction between us English and the Americans which may for a time operate to our disadvantage; for we English insist upon claiming all Americans as belonging to our race, and springing from the same ancestry as ourselves, and hence the idea of any actual hostility between them and us shocks our sense of relations.h.i.+p; and yet in reality a large and very active proportion of the American people derives its origin from other races besides the Anglo-Saxon.
German and Dutch and Celtic forefathers combine to form the giant family of the United States; but there is one cause forever at work to cement all these varieties of origin, and to compel the American people, as a whole, to be proud as we are of their affinity with the English race.
What is that cause? What is that agency? Is it not that of one language in common between the two nations? It is in the same mother tongue that their poets must sing, that their philosophers must reason, that their orators must argue upon truth or contend for power.
I see before me a distinguished guest, distinguished for the manner in which he has brought together all that is most modern in sentiment with all that is most scholastic in thought and language; permit me to say, Mr. Matthew Arnold. I appeal to him if I am not right when I say that it is by a language in common that all differences of origin sooner or later we are welded together--that Etruscans, and Sabines, and Oscans, and Romans, became one family as Latins once, as Italians now? Before that agency of one language in common have not all differences of ancestral origin in England between Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, melted away; and must not all similar differences equally melt away in the nurseries of American mothers, extracting the earliest lessons of their children from our own English Bible, or in the schools of preceptors who must resort to the same models of language whenever they bid their pupils rival the prose of Macaulay and Prescott, or emulate the verse of Tennyson and Longfellow? Now, it seems to me that nothing can more quicken the sense of that relations.h.i.+p which a language in common creates, than the presence and voice of a writer equally honored and beloved in the old world and in the new; and I cannot but think that where-ever our American kinsfolk welcome that presence, or hang spell-bound on that voice, they will feel irresistibly how much of fellows.h.i.+p and unison there is between the hearts of America and England. So that when our countrymen quits their sh.o.r.es he will leave behind him many a new friend to the old fatherland which greets them through him so cordially in the accents of the mother tongue. And in those accents what a sense of priceless obligations--obligations personal to him and through him to the land he represents--must steal over his American audience! How many hours in which pain and sickness have changed into cheerfulness and mirth beneath the wand of this enchanter! How many a combatant beaten down in the battle of life--and nowhere is the battle of life more sharply waged than in the commonwealth of America--has caught new hope, new courage, new force from the manly lessons of this un.o.btrusive teacher!
Gentlemen, it is no wonder that the rising generation of people who have learned to think and to feel in our language, should eagerly desire to see face to face the man to whose genius, from their very childhood, they have turned for warmth and for light as instinctively as young plants turn to the sun. But I must not forget that it is not I whom you have come to hear; and all I might say, if I had to vindicate the fame of our guest from disparagement or cavil, would seem but tedious and commonplace when addressed to those who know that his career has pa.s.sed beyond the ordeal of contemporaneous criticism, and that in the applause of foreign nations it has found a foretaste of the judgment of posterity. I feel as if every word that I have already said had too long delayed the toast which I now propose: ”A prosperous voyage, health and long life, to our ill.u.s.trious guest and countryman, Charles d.i.c.kens.”
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
SPIRIT OF NEW ENGLAND LITERATURE
[Speech of Hamilton W. Mabie at the ninety-first annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1896. Henry E. Howland, vice-President of the Society, presided and introduced the speaker as follows: ”There is no person better qualified to speak upon any literary subject than the editor of a great paper. He scans the whole horizon of literature, and his motto is: 'Where the bee sups there sup I.' As a gentleman eminently fitted to speak upon the literature of New England or any kindred subject, I have the pleasure of introducing to you Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, of 'The Outlook.'”]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--When one has the army and navy behind him, he is impelled to be brief. And when one has a subject which needs no interpreter, when one has a theme the very recital of the details of which recalls the most splendid chapter in our intellectual history, one feels that any words would be impertinent. We are indebted to New England, in the first place, for giving us a literature. I know it has been questioned in Congress, why anybody should want a literature; but if the spiritual rank of a people is to be determined by depth and richness of life, and if the register of this life of a people is its art, and especially its art in books, then no country is reputable among the n.o.bler countries unless it has produced a literature; and we are, therefore, indebted to New England for literature. Not the greatest we shall produce, but a literature continuous from the first settlement of the colonies. It is a very significant fact that the three men before the Revolution whom we may call literary men were men born in New England--Benjamin Franklin, who is too well known to all of you for comment; John Woolman, of whose work Charles Lamb said: ”Woolman's writings should be learned by heart;” and that great theologian, who wrote in a stately style, Jonathan Edwards.
After the Revolution I have but to call the roll of those names which are the glory of New England--Hawthorne, the man of finest literary gift who has yet appeared upon this continent; Longfellow, with his tender touch; Holmes, with his three o'clock wit, as some one has called it, the man who was always awake; Lowell, with his rich culture and his pa.s.sionate loyalty to all that was best in life and art; and the historians of the country, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, and Francis Parkman, with his splendid record of patient and tireless energy. And then we have the New England writers of the second generation in Edmund Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, John Fiske, and Henry James; and we have also a third generation.
The most striking characteristic of the older, as of the younger, New England literature is its deep and beautiful humanism, the closeness of its touch upon experience, the warmth of its sympathy with men and women in contact with the great movement of life. Growing out of such a soil, it could hardly have been otherwise, for New England represents, not an abstraction, but a commanding faith in personality, the clear self-realization of a man whose obligation goes straight to G.o.d, and to whom G.o.d's word travels like an arrow's flight. In one form or another, all the New England writers deal with this theme; they are concerned, not with abstractions, but with the hopes and fears and temptations of man. Hawthorne is absorbed in the problem of the return of a man's deed, or of his ancestors' deed upon himself; Lowell cares supremely for n.o.bility and freedom of impulse, act and deed; Whittier for truth and spiritual fellows.h.i.+p; Emerson, for the reality of spiritual force and meaning in common duties and ordinary relations; Longfellow, for the tenderness and purity of childhood, the sweetness and fragrance of family relations, the charm of historic a.s.sociation; Holmes, for the endless paradox and surprise which are in human thought and conduct; Brooks, for the abundance of man's life and the fulness of its spiritual possibilities; Curtis, for a public life at once pure, free, rich and stable. For all these writers organization and inst.i.tutions had great interest, but they cared primarily for the men whose history these inst.i.tutions represent. The quays at Geneva are ma.s.sive and s.h.i.+ne at night like a constellation; but our interest centres in the river which rushes between them from the Alps to the sea. This is a democratic note, but there is another quite as distinct and characteristic--the note of buoyant cheerfulness, faith in G.o.d and man.
There is a ringing tone in the literature of New England which is not only a protest against any form of oppression, but a challenge to fate.
That courage came from faith in the divine order of life. And that buoyant courage and cheerfulness were possible because these writers kept life and art in harmony. There was no schism between ideal and action in them. They not only followed the vision in spirit; they lived in the light of it. They ill.u.s.trated that unity of life without which there is no G.o.d. They kept in the way of growth and truth and inspiration because they lived wisely. We do not half value their splendid sanity. A manly and n.o.ble moral health was theirs. They rang true to every moral appeal. They were not only men of letters, but they were also gentlemen, and they have a.s.sociated literature in the thought of the country with dignity, culture and beauty of life--Emerson's unworldliness, Lowell's loyalty to truth, and Curtis's splendid rect.i.tude, as enduring as the granite, are of lasting value to the higher life of the nation.
Their courage and buoyancy were of higher value than we yet understand.
Faith is absolutely essential in a great democratic society. When we cease to believe in G.o.d we cease to believe in man, and when our faith in man goes, democracy becomes a vast, irrational engine of tyranny and corruption. In the last a.n.a.lysis democracy rests in the belief that there is something of the divine in every man, and that through every life there s.h.i.+nes a glimpse of the eternal order. For Government rests, not in the will of the majority, but on the will of G.o.d; and democracy is but a vaster surface upon which to discover the play of that will. It follows from these characteristics that the real significance of the New England writers lies not in what they did, but in what they unconsciously predicted. Clear and ringing as are the notes they struck, these notes are prelusive; they suggest the great _motifs_, but they do not completely unfold them; they could not, for the time was not yet ripe; they announced the principle of individuality, and they sang the great idea of nationality; but the depth and richness of national life was not theirs to express. That vast life rises more and more into the national consciousness, but its Homer or Dante or Shakespeare has not appeared--probably cannot appear for a long time to come. That life is too wide and still too inharmonious for clear expression. Its very richness postpones the day of its ultimate expression; but when the hour is ripe it will embody an ideal as significant as any in history, with ill.u.s.tration more varied and vital. We are still the victims of our continent; we shall one day be its masters.
One of the oldest drawings in the world is on the side of a cave in France, and represents a man fleeing naked and defenceless from a great serpent--man still in bondage to material conditions. One of the most stirring of modern scenes is that in which Siegfried waits at the mouth of the cavern--leaves rustling, light s.h.i.+mmering, birds singing about him. The glory of youth is on him and the beauty of the world about him; but he cannot understand what the sounds mean. Then comes the struggle, the victory, the revelation of song and light; and the hero pa.s.ses swiftly up the heights, where, encircled with flame, sleeps the soul of his strength. In some other day, when the continent is tamed and we have struck to the heart that materialism which is our only real foe, we, too, shall climb the heights of achievement, and we shall stand face to face with that ideal which is now so dim and remote. Then comes the poet of the real new world--the world of opportunity, of sacrifice, of unselfish freedom of the larger art and diviner life. And when that day comes and the great poet sings and the great writer speaks, we shall hear faint and far the sounds of those old voices of New England; not so vast as the later music, but as pure and harmonious and true. We shall understand how they made the later music possible; how they have made possible the fulfilment of the prediction of one of their own number: between Shakespeare in the cradle and Shakespeare in ”Hamlet” there was needed but an interval of time, and the same sublime condition is all that lies between the America of toil and the America of art.
[Applause.]
DONALD SAGE MACKAY
THE DUTCH DOMINE