Modern Eloquence Volume Ii Part 17

(RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES)

YOUR SPEECH AND OURS

[Speech of Lord Houghton, in response to William Cullen Bryant, at a breakfast given in his honor at the Century Club, New York, October 17, 1875. William Cullen Bryant, President of the Club, presided, and said in part: "Our guest, Lord Houghton, was not born a lord, but he was born a poet, which I take to be something better. Some forty years ago, I think it was, he wandered in Switzerland, Italy and Greece, and the impressions made upon his mind are woven into his beautiful series of poems published under the t.i.tle of 'Memorials of Many Scenes.' At a later period, perhaps ten years afterward, he traveled in Egypt and the western coast of Asia, and returned, bringing with him a sheaf of 'Palm-Leaves,' a series of charming poems, inspired by the remarkable places which he visited, and by the incidents of his journey. These 'palm-leaves,' let me say, have a perennial verdure, they are yet as green as when they were gathered and still breathe Sabaean odors--the spicy perfume of the Orient--what the old poet Donne calls 'the almighty balm of the early East.' He is now a traveler in our territory, a region almost without antiquities, but of sufficient interest to attract his steps. .h.i.ther. He will doubtless see faults in our social and political condition--the eyes of a stranger are quicker to discern them than our own can be--but let us hope that he will carry back to his native land the recollections of a cordial reception among our people, such as I hope we are ever ready to accord to personal worth, to genius, and to services rendered to the human race.

The only time I ever saw Dr. Bowring, which was some thirty years since, when he was a member of Parliament, of the party called Radical, is memorable with me on account of the eulogy of our guest, which he uttered with much warmth and enthusiasm. He praised the generosity of his sentiments and the largeness of his sympathies. 'At his table,' he added, 'you meet with men of various differing opinions; the only t.i.tle to his hospitality and esteem is personal merit.' The same rule of preference which he applied to the individuals whom he admitted to his friendship, had governed him throughout a long public life in the measures which he had supported.

His co-operation and efficient aid have been given to proceedings and measures which contemplate the well-being of the people--to useful and beneficial reforms. In their favor he steadily gave his vote and raised his voice. In honoring him we, therefore, honor not only the poet, but the philanthropist and the statesman. I propose, therefore, the health of Lord Houghton."]

MR. BRYANT AND GENTLEMEN:--In finding myself here now for the first time, I am agitated by conflicting emotions, by my pleasure in being among you, and by my regret at not having been here before.

In alluding to my poetic experience, Mr. Bryant mentioned that I had pa.s.sed many years of my early life in Italy, and while he was so doing there arose in my memory a little incident not inapplicable to my present position. I pa.s.sed some time at Venice; and one summer evening, on the Piazza di San Marco, my attention was attracted by an old man, who walked up and down with a mingled air of wonder and delight, and who, after I had observed him for some moments, came and asked me in the Venetian dialect what streets he was to take toward a certain remote portion of the city. I said I was a foreigner, and that he, being a native of the place, must know its geography better than I could. He then told me that he was there for the first time. He had pa.s.sed all his life in his own distinct world, there earning his daily bread, and occupied by its little local interests. At last a friend had told him that he must see the Place and Church of San Marco before he died, and put him in a boat and landed him there, and now he wanted to find his way home, charmed and contented.

Gentlemen, I am in the position of that Venetian veteran, and shall return to my country, happy that I have at last found my way to this great place and habitation--the civitas of English-speaking people. Not that I have ever failed to regard this country in many senses as my own, from the time when I took moral comfort from the flight of Mr. Bryant's "Wild Fowl" across the ocean, and took the best lesson of life from the Psalm of Longfellow. Since then I have ever been with you in all your intellectual progress, and in the necessarily checkered course of your const.i.tutional history, and never more than in the late solemn years, in all the national difficulties which you have so energetically, so persistently, and so humanely surmounted.

In looking back to my impressions of those times, I sometimes think that my sympathy with you was not wholly unselfish, but that I felt that, if I had ever written anything which has a chance of a prolonged existence, I should wish it to be read, not by any distracted and impotent communities of British race, but by America, one and indivisible. And, gentlemen, this is not unnatural, for amid all the divisions or distractions of your history, your literature has ever been patriotic and national. Literature, in truth, has been to you a good and faithful emigrant, reproductive not only of all intellectual growth, but of the sympathies--the largest sympathies--which bind together man to man. It has settled among you every cla.s.sic writer of British origin, and from the Continent it has brought to you Goethe, Schiller, and Heinrich Heine. It is also noticeable that by the side of these great colonizations of thought you have not refused to receive and to pa.s.s to your furthest Territories the humblest addition, the single volume of verse, the chance felicitous expression of combined thought and feeling, even some accidental refrain of song that had pleasantly caught the ear and gone to the heart of man.

And this brings me to say to you one professional word respecting that art and the nature of poetry that you have been kind enough to connect with my name. The greater part of the verses I have written were that product of the lyrical period of youth which is by no means uncommon in modern civilization. It exhibits itself sometimes in the strangest manner, without connection with other culture, or even the most common intellectual opportunities. Of this I happen to have given to the world a signal instance in the volume I published of the poems of David Gray, a Scotch weaver-boy, who, without one advantage beyond the common education of his cla.s.s, described all the nature within his ken in the highest poetic perfection, and pa.s.sed away, leaving a most pathetic record of a short life of imaginative sensibility. You can contrast this simple and wayside flower of a faculty with such rich and complete cultivation as it can a.s.sume in the efflorescence of Tennyson or Swinburne; but in whatever form you find it, do not the less value the faculty itself. Permit me to say that in no condition of society can it be encouraged and fertilized more usefully than among yourselves. For not only will it bring with it calm and comfort amid all the superabundant activities, ambitions, and confusions of daily life, but it has also the regulative powers teaching men to divide the sphere of the imagination from that of practical life, and thus obviating the dangers that so often arise from the want of this distinction.

There is no better preservative than the exercise of the poetic faculty from religious hallucinations, from political delusions, and I would say even from financial extravagances. Therefore, through the whole vast range of this new world, be on the watch to look out for and to encourage this great gift to man. Do not be too hard with any imperfections or absence of refinement which may accompany its exhibition. Do not treat it too critically or with too much scholastic censure. Recognize also its value on another ground--the extension and the perpetuation of our great common language--an interest not less dear to every one of us here present than to the future welfare of mankind:--

"Beyond the vague Atlantic deep, Far as the farthest prairies sweep, Where mountain wastes the sense appall Where burns the radiant Western Fall, One duty lies on old and young-- With filial piety to guard, As on its greenest native sward, The glory of the English tongue!

"That ample speech, that subtle speech, Apt for the needs of all in each, Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend Wherever human feelings tend, Preserve its force, expand its powers, And through the maze of civil life, In letters, commerce, e'en in strife, Remember, it is yours and ours!"

BONDS OF NATIONAL SYMPATHY

[Response of Lord Houghton to the address of Joseph H. Choate at the farewell reception given in honor of Lord Houghton by the Union League Club, New York City, November 23, 1875.]

MR. CHOATE AND GENTLEMEN:--Before you spoke I had much difficulty to interpret to myself the meaning of my reception here. So unimportant as I know myself to have been before, in political and social life, I have been surprised at the manner in which I have been received in the United States of America. You, sir, have given an explanation of that problem which I am very thankful to receive. The habit of Americans to welcome Englishmen, whatever may be their position, in itself proves to me that you regard us as something above individuals, and that, somehow or other, you connect us in every way by imagination, if no other, as present with that great country over the Atlantic which was your mother, and which it has been the habit of many of your ancestors to call their home. [Applause.] Mr. Choate has alluded to certain events in my political life, which he says fully justify your kindness and remarkable sympathy of to-day, and on that matter, if there are to be any relations between myself and the Americans, upon that point I can say that I deserve credit. I do not say this with any affectation, because I understand fully your feelings upon that matter.

I fully recognize, I completely comprehend, as man to man, that in that day of your greatest trouble, even the small voice that came over the great Atlantic was listened to with extreme pleasure and unexaggerated sympathy.

But when I look to myself, I am bound to say I find extremely little merit in the matter. There was one ground of sympathy between you and the English people, which you had the holiest right to believe would have been absolute and overpowering. The English nation had put itself forward as the great opponent of slavery in the world. [Applause.] It had stated at the Congress of Vienna that the one point which England required as the _sine qua non_ was the abolition of the slave trade. For that purpose England not only a.s.serted itself, but interfered up to the utmost limit, perhaps beyond the limits of the law of nations, with all the powers of the world. Therefore, you had a perfect right to believe, to suppose, that in a question, in a matter in which we were not only internationally but morally interested, the questions would be fully considered.

Well, gentlemen, I cannot say that it was so. As an individual I have not the right to reproach my country upon that point. That was not my first feeling in the matter. I felt, I knew, slavery was doomed from the civilized world. My heart, my instincts, my sense of the well-being of every civilized state was against the continuance of that inst.i.tution.

[Applause.] I knew, though it was possible--aye, I would fain say probable--that the condition of the slave, under many conditions, under many circ.u.mstances, might be better than that of the free laborer of the world, that the condition of the slave owner was incompatible with the highest form of moral culture and highest ambition. I always think that question had political as well as moral and religious considerations, and that, through the unhappy condition of this continent, the question of slavery got so intermixed with the question of property that, however humane, however wise men were, yet nevertheless it would bring with it an incidental condition of cruelty abhorrent to mankind, and that, therefore, that inst.i.tution could not continue to the end. [Applause.]

But, making a clean breast of it, that was not the bottom of my sympathy. My sympathy with you comes, as Mr. Choate has said, by "an instinct unawares," and this was confirmed by any reasoning and any deductions I might have had. From the imagination of my earliest youth, from the sympathy of the most vivid time, and from the most logical look at the situation in my mature life, I came to the conclusion that the destiny of the present and the future world rests with great and undivided empires. [Applause.] I had lived to see Italy, out of its confusion of States, growing up into a great integrity, renewing the promises of the wonderful cla.s.sic times and the glory of Rome renovated into a new and prosperous nation. I have lived to see, we have all lived to see, the same process taking place in Germany. In Germany, notwithstanding the greatest division, the most peculiar separation of religion and even of races, yet nevertheless that great German empire is coming forward as a monument of the civilization of the future world, and as the centre of all Europe against any form of Oriental barbarism.

And I knew from the history of my own country that that was no new principle, but one we had always maintained. England never at any moment thought of giving up the principle of the integrity of its empire. You yourselves are the evidences of the energy with which we sustained it.

[Prolonged applause.] And we had at our doors, we had within us, another nation, in many points alien to ourselves; of a different race largely, of a different religion almost generally; a nation which we had treated sometimes with kindness, sometimes with harshness, sometimes with justice, and many other times with injustice; but always on the principle of the integrity of the empire. [Applause.] And I could not see how an intelligent man could see what Italy was growing to, prophesy what Germany would become, and, knowing the difficulties of the present Ireland, how that man could wish to destroy the integrity of the United States. Fact and history were against him, and in addition to that I felt that--in favoring or in sustaining your separation, in allowing special and local sympathy to act upon me, instead of the great logic of historical truths--if I could have allowed myself to act in that line of sympathy which would have bound me to my countrymen, I should have felt I had belied the truth of history as well as, I believe, the foundation of general morality. [Great applause.]

Therefore, gentlemen, I have little individual merit for whatever I may have said upon that matter. I tell you that that was the calculation, the best calculation of my own mind, that it was the simple result of the deduction of my own reasoning [applause], and if you have shown me grat.i.tude on this matter I will not say that I have not felt in a certain sense it was not deserved, from the motives I have alluded to.

And if, as some cynic has said, grat.i.tude is nothing whatever but the means of securing favors to come, I can a.s.sure you that you have accomplished your object [laughter and applause], and if you have desired that, in any means which Providence has placed in my power, in any influence direct or indirect which I may exert, I shall speak as I have spoken and think as I have thought of the United States of America, you may be well sure that I will do so. [Applause.]

On another occasion when I have been kindly received, I have spoken of my literary sympathy with this country. Every Englishman rightly looks to this country as he would with a sense of appeal to posterity. He feels that if he has said anything, if he has written anything, if he has touched any chord, if he has struck even any verbal a.s.surance that pleases mankind, if you take it up you pa.s.s it on; it does not go from tongue to tongue in the little distant Anglia of Europe.

I recognize that I have met in this country men whom I shall be glad to meet anywhere and with whose familiarity I have been honored. And I might say this, that if I were to compare the best men that I have met here with the best men that I have known in Europe, I should say simply this, that the men that I have found here seem to me as equal to the circ.u.mstances in which they have been placed, as intelligent in all their relations of life, as n.o.ble in their innermost impulses, as just in their expressions, as any I have ever met with in my intercourse with people in Europe. [Applause.] I have been honored with the familiarity of many distinguished men, I have been received with great kindness by your intelligent and able President. I had the fortune, the other day, to sit by the deathbed of that amiable, honest man, your Vice-President [Henry Wilson], in the Capitol at Washington, dying under the portrait of Jefferson. I have seen some of your able men with whom I have been intimate in Europe, and one whom you will allow me to mention above all others, a man whose career I witnessed during the great and stormy times of your troubles in England--Charles Francis Adams [long applause]--whose maintenance of your dignity was concurrent with a sense of the importance of good relations between England and America.

Gentlemen, next year you will celebrate your Centennial, and I have been kindly asked by every person who wished me good-bye to come back to this Centennial. [Laughter.] As for the Centennial itself, I have no particular inclination to come back. I think it is quite right you should have your Centennial, but I do not quite see what an Englishman has to do with it. [Long laughter and applause.] It is a thing which a philosopher might almost make the foundation of a theory, that you who are going to have this magnificent celebration of the one hundredth year of your liberation from the horrible rule of England, at the same time accompany it with the warmest feelings toward the British nation.

[Laughter and applause.] Now, if you will clearly understand that this Centennial is to be your last celebration of this kind, and that from that moment you become part of the great community of Europe, then I say it will be a very useful celebration and one which all the world will be ready to honor. Celebrating your independence, you call it. A very n.o.ble act at a very n.o.ble time! Your repulsion was fully justified by the folly and the stupidity and the ignorance of England.

The causes of England and America are not different, but common to both.

You have your own local difficulties, just as we have. You have your own religious difficulties, just as we have. Take a single instance. The question of local taxation--a very serious question with you, a question agitated in the great States. That question is one of the greatest importance that we are at this moment discussing in politics. It is a matter of great interest to us whether local taxation should be entrusted and commissioned to a body of persons specially appointed for that purpose by the Crown, or whether it should be entrusted to certain persons selected by the people. That will be one of the most important questions we shall have to consider in the next session or two of Parliament. It is said that there is great profusion, great waste, in our present arrangement of those matters, and that if our local expenditure were conducted by persons specially appointed for that purpose, it would be cheaper. I don't say more honestly, but more economically managed. This is a question that you are agitating at the present moment, and one that affects the politics of your great cities.

Take again railroads. It is a question whether the railroad should be in the hands of the State or of private companies. We are talking about it every day. Our interest in rapid transit has been very much the same as yours. Our rapid transit has not only gone over certain unfortunate persons who stood in the way, but it has gone over ruined hopes and prostrated energies. There is hardly a question that I see agitated in American newspapers that, in one form or another, is not agitated with us. The act of Parliament which restored to England specie payments was met with exactly the same argument, exactly the same controversy, exactly the same speciousness as meet you in this country. We have followed you on the matter of popular education. You have been our teachers in that branch. We are at present following in your footsteps.

[Applause.]

JULIA WARD HOWE

TRIBUTE TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

[Speech of Julia Ward Howe at the breakfast in celebration of the seventieth birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, given by the publishers of the "Atlantic Monthly," Boston, Ma.s.s., December 3, 1879. Mrs. Howe sat at the right of Mr. Howells, then the editor of the "Atlantic,"

who presided at one end of the tables, with Mr. Emerson on his left.

Dr. Holmes sat on the right of Mr. Houghton, who presided at the other end of the table, with Mrs. Stowe on his left. Mrs. Howe was called up by the toast, "The girls we have not left behind us."]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--One word in courtesy I must say in replying to so kind a mention as that which is made, not only of me, but of those of my s.e.x who are so happy as to be present here to-day. I think, in looking on this scene, of a certain congress which took place in Paris more than a year ago, and it was called a congress of literary people, _gens de lettres_. When I heard that this was to take place I immediately bestirred myself to attend its sittings and went at once to the headquarters to find how I might do so. I then learned to my great astonishment that no women were to be included among these _gens de lettres_, that is, literary people. [Laughter.] Now, we have thought it a very modest phrase sometimes to plead that, whatever women may not be, they are people. [Laughter and applause.] And it would seem to-day that they are recognized as literary people, and I am very glad that you gentlemen have found room for the sisterhood to-day, and have found room to place them so numerously here, and I must say that to my eyes the banquet looks very much more cheerful than it would without them.

[Applause.] It looks to me as though it had all blossomed out under a new social influence, and beside each dark stem I see a rose. [Laughter and applause.] But I must say at once that I came here entirely unprovided with a speech, and, not dreaming of one, yet I came provided with something. I considered myself invited as a sort of grandmother--indeed, I am, and I know a grandmother is usually expected to have something in her pocket. [Laughter and applause.] And I have a very modest tribute to the ill.u.s.trious person whom we are met to-day to honor. With your leave I will read it. [Applause.]

Thou metamorphic G.o.d!

Who mak'st the straight Olympus thy abode, Hermes to subtle laughter moving, Apollo with serener loving, Thou demi-G.o.d also!

Who dost all the powers of healing know; Thou hero who dost wield The golden sword and shield,-- Shield of a comprehensive mind, And sword to wound the foes of human kind;

Thou man of n.o.ble mould!

Whose metal grows not cold Beneath the hammer of the hurrying years; A fiery breath doth blow Across its fervid glow, And still its resonance delights our ears;

Loved of thy brilliant mates, Relinquished to the fates, Whose spirit music used to chime with thine, Transfigured in our sight, Not quenched in death's dark night, They hold thee in companionship divine.

O autocratic muse!

Soul-rainbow of all hues, Packed full of service are thy bygone years; Thy winged steed doth fly Across the starry sky, Bearing the lowly burthens of thy tears.

I try this little leap, Wishing that from the deep, I might some pearl of song adventurous bring.

Despairing, here I stop, And my poor offering drop,-- Why stammer I when thou art here to sing?

CLARK HOWELL