Modern Eloquence Volume Ii Part 26

In 1866 it presented to the widow of a Southern officer in the United States Navy several historic swords, sending with them a purse, "in recognition of the valuable services rendered to our country by the father and son, and as a token that grat.i.tude for fidelity to the flag of the Union is an abiding sentiment with the citizens of New York, descending from generation to generation."

The cities of Troy, Portland, Richmond, Chicago, three of them when swept by fire, and Richmond when cast into gloom by the fall of the State Capitol, all in turn have realized, through the prompt action of the Chamber, the large brotherliness of commercial New York.

And, finally, in 1876, at Savannah, and in 1878, through the whole southwestern district of the country, and again in 1879 at Memphis, the contributions made through the Chamber of Commerce gave substantial relief to the distressed victims of yellow fever. Thus has the Chamber contributed to promote a union of hearts throughout the broad expanse of this great Union of States. Thus has the Chamber done what it could to show that the spirit of commerce is a large and a liberal spirit, too large to be bounded by the lines that divide nations. Thus has the Chamber shown itself not unworthy of the Empire State of the New World.

May the future of the Chamber be in every respect worthy of the past.

[Loud applause,]

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

HARVARD ALUMNI

[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at Cambridge, Ma.s.s., June 30, 1875. Mr. Lowell was the presiding officer.]

BRETHREN OF THE ALUMNI:--It is, I think, one of the greatest privileges conferred upon us by our degree that we can meet together once a year in this really majestic hall [Memorial Hall], commemorative of our proudest sorrows, suggestive only of our least sordid ambitions; that we can meet here to renew our pledge of fealty to the ancient mother who did so much for the generations that have gone before us, and who will be as benign to those who, by-and-by, shall look back and call us fathers. The tie that binds us to our college is one of the purest, since it is that which unites us also with our youth; it is one of the happiest, for it binds us to the days when we looked forward and not backward, for in hope there is nothing to regret, while in retrospect there is a touch of autumn and a premonition of winter.

In this year of centennials, when none of us would be surprised if a century plant should blossom in our back yard [laughter], when I myself am matured, as I look to complete my second centennial on Sat.u.r.day afternoon [laughter and applause], there is a kind of repose, as it seems to me, in coming back here to sit in the lap of this dear old nurse who is well on toward her three hundred, and who will certainly never ask any of us to celebrate her centennial either in prose or verse. To this college our Revolution which we are celebrating this year is modern. And I think also one of the great privileges which she confers upon us is that she gives us a claim of kindred still with the mother country--a claim purely intellectual and safe from the embitterment of war or the jealousies of trade. It was an offshoot of Cambridge and Oxford that was planted on the banks of the Charles, and by men from Cambridge and Oxford; and when I visited those renowned nurseries of piety, scholarship, and manliness of thought, my keenest pleasure in the kindness I received was the feeling that I owed the greater part of it to my connection with Harvard, whom they were pleased to acknowledge as a plant not unworthy of the parent stock. [Applause.]

In their halls I could not feel myself a stranger, and I resented the imputation of being a foreigner when I looked round upon the old portraits, all of whom were my countrymen as well as theirs, and some of whom had been among our founders and benefactors. In this year of reconciliations and atonements, too, the influence of college a.s.sociations is of no secondary importance as a bond of union. On this day, in every State of our more than ever to be united country, there are men whose memories turn back tenderly and regretfully to those haunts of their early manhood. Our college also, stretching back as it does toward the past, and forward to an ever-expanding future, gives a sense of continuity which is some atonement for the brevity of life.

These portraits that hang about us seem to make us contemporaries with generations that are gone, and the services we render her will make us in turn familiar to those who shall succeed us here. There is no way so cheap of buying what I may call a kind of mitigated immortality,--mean by that an immortality without the pains and penalty attached commonly to it, of being dug up once in fifty years to have your claims reconsidered [laughter]--as in giving something to the college.

[Applause.] Nay, I will say in parenthesis, that even an intention to give it secures that place of which I have spoken. [Laughter.] I find in the records of the college an ancestor of my own recorded as having intended to give a piece of land. He remains there forever with his beneficent intention. It is not certain that he didn't carry it out. The land certainly never came to me, or I should make rest.i.tution. [Laughter and applause.]

Consider, for example, William Pennoyer; how long ago would he have sunk in the tenacious ooze of oblivion, not leaving rack nor even rumor of himself behind. No portrait of him exists, and no living descendant, so far as I know, and yet his name is familiar with all of us who are familiar with the records of the college, and he always presents himself to our imaginations in the gracious att.i.tude of putting his hand into his pocket. [Laughter.] And tell me, if you please, what widow of a London alderman ever insured her life with so sure return or perdurable interest as Madame Holden. Even the bodiless society, _pro propaganda fide,_ is reincorporated forever in the perpetuity of our grat.i.tude. It is the genteelest of immortalities, as the auctioneer would call it, the immortality of perfect seclusion.

The value of such an a.s.sociation as this as a spur to honorable exertion is also, as it seems to me, no small part of its benefit. Leigh Hunt, says, somewhere, that when he was writing an essay he always thought of certain persons and said to himself, "A will like this, B will rub his hands at that"; and it is safe to say that any graduate of this college would prefer the suffrages of his brethren here to those of any other public. And when any of the sons of Harvard who has done her honor and his country upright service, meets us here on this day, it is not only a fitting recognition, but a powerful incentive, that he receives in the "Well done" of our plaudits. I had hoped that we should have heard to-day the voice of one graduate of Harvard who sits almost immediately upon my right. [Charles Francis Adams.] I will not press upon his modesty, but I will ask you to bear witness once more that Peace hath her victories, and more renowned than war [long continued applause]; and honor with me those truly durable years of service and that of victory, which if it hath not so loud an echo as that of the battle-field, will be seen to have a longer one. [Renewed and loud applause.] It appears to me that there is nothing more grateful to the human heart than this appreciation of cultivated men. If it be not the echo of posterity, it was something more solid and well-pleasing. But better and more wholesome than even this must it be, I should think, for men spending their lives in the dusty glare of public life, to come back once a year to our quiet shades and be, as Dr. Holmes has so delightfully sung, plain Bill and Joe again. It must renew and revive in them the early sweetness of their nature, the frank delight in simple things which makes so large a part of the better happiness of life.

But, gentlemen, I will not longer detain you with the inevitable suggestions of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from under him who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy foot of a c.o.c.kney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace.

I had a kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be unable to fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely here with a tablet in the wall before me inscribed: _Guilielmo Roberto Ware, Henrico Van Brunt, optime de Academia meritis, eo quod facundiam postprandialem irritam fecerunt._ I hope you understood my Latin [laughter], and I hope you will forgive me the antiquity of my p.r.o.nunciation [laughter]; but it is simply because I cannot help it.

Then on a blackboard behind me I could have written in large letters the names of our guests who should make some brief dumb show of acknowledgment. You, at least, with your united applause, could make yourselves heard. If brevity ever needed an excuse, I might claim one in the fact that I have consented at short notice to be one of the performers in our domestic centennial next Sat.u.r.day, and poetry is not a thing to be delivered on demand without an exhausting wear upon the nerves. When I wrote to Dr. Holmes and begged for a little poem, I got the following answer, which I shall take the liberty of reading. I don't see the Doctor himself in the hall, which encourages me to go on:--

"MY DEAR JAMES:--Somebody has written a note in your name requesting me to furnish a few verses for some occasion which he professed to be interested in. I am satisfied, of course, that it is a forgery. I know you would not do such a thing as to ask a brother rhymer, utterly exhausted by his centennial efforts, to endanger his health and compromise his reputation by any d.a.m.nable iteration of spasmodic squeezing. [Laughter.] So I give you warning that some dangerous person is using your name, and taking advantage of the great love I bear you, to play upon my feelings. Don't think for a moment that I hold you in any way responsible for this note, looking so nearly like your own handwriting as for a single instant to deceive me, and suggest the idea that I would take a pa.s.sage for Europe in season to avoid all the college anniversaries."

I readily excused him, and I am sure you will be kind enough to be charitable to me, gentlemen.

I know that one of the things which the graduates of the college look forward to with the most confident expectation and pleasure is the report of the President of the University. [Applause.] I remember that when I was in the habit of attending the meetings of the faculty, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was very much struck by the fact that almost every matter of business that required particular ability was sure to gravitate into the hands of a young professor of chemistry. The fact made so deep an impression upon me that I remember that I used to feel, when our war broke out, that this young professor might have to take the care of one of our regiments, and I know that he would have led it to victory. And when I heard that the same professor was nominated for President, I had no doubt of the result which all of us have seen to follow. I give you, gentlemen, the health of President Eliot of Harvard College. [Applause.]

NATIONAL GROWTH OF A CENTURY

[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at Cambridge, Ma.s.s., June 28, 1876. Mr. Lowell, as President of the Alumni a.s.sociation, occupied the chair.]

BRETHREN:--Though perhaps there be nothing in a hundredth year to make it more emphatic than those years which precede it and which follow it, and though the celebration of centennials be a superst.i.tious survival from the time when to count ten upon the fingers was a great achievement in arithmetic, and to find the square of that number carried with it something of the awe and solemnity which invests the higher mathematics to us of the laity, yet I think no wise man can be indifferent to any sentiment which so profoundly and powerfully affects the imagination of the ma.s.s of his fellows. The common consent of civilized mankind seems to have settled on the centennial commemoration of great events as leaving an interval s.p.a.cious enough to be impressive, and having a roundness of completion in its period. We, the youngest of nations, the centuries to us are not yet grown so cheap and commonplace as to Napoleon when he saw forty of them looking in undisguised admiration upon his army, bronzed from their triumphs in Italy. For my own part I think the scrutiny of one age is quite enough to bear without calling in thirty-nine others to its a.s.sistance. [Applause.]

It is quite true that a hundred years are but as a day in the life of a nation, are but as a tick of the clock to the long-drawn aeons in which this planet hardened itself for the habitation of man, and man accommodated himself to his habitation; but they are all we have, and we must make the best of them. Perhaps, after all, it is no such great misfortune to be young, especially if we are conscious at the time that youth means opportunity, and not accomplishment. I think that, after all, when we look back upon a hundred years through which the country has pa.s.sed, the vista is not so disheartening as to the indigestive fancy it might at first appear. If we have lost something of that Arcadian simplicity which the French travellers of a hundred years ago found here,--perhaps because they looked for it, perhaps because of their impenetrability by the English tongue,--we have lost something also of that self-sufficiency which is the mark as well of provincials as of barbarians, and which is the great hindrance to all true advancement. It is a wholesome symptom, I think, if we are beginning to show some of that talent for grumbling which is the undoubted heirloom of the race to which most of us belong. [Laughter and applause.] Even the Fourth-of-July oration is edging round into a lecture on our national shortcomings, and the proud eagle himself is beginning to have no little misgiving at the amplitude between the tips of his wings.

[Laughter.]

But while it may be admitted that our government was more decorously administered one hundred years ago, if our national housekeeping of to-day is further removed from honest business principles, and therefore is more costly, both morally and financially, than that of any other Christian nation, it is no less true that the hundredth year of our existence finds us in the ma.s.s very greatly advanced in the refinement and culture and comfort that are most operative in making a country civilized and in keeping it so. [Applause.] When we talk of decline of public and private virtue I think that we forget that that better former day was a day of small communities and of uneasy locomotion, when public opinion acted more directly and more sharply, was brought to bear more convincingly upon the individual than is possible now. But grant that though the dread of what is said and thought be but a poor subst.i.tute and makeshift for conscience,--that austere and sleepless safeguard of character, which, if not an instinct, acquires all the attributes of an instinct, and whose repeated warnings make duty at least an unconscious habitude,--after all, this outside subst.i.tute is the strongest motive for well-doing in the majority of our race, and men of thought and culture should waste no opportunity to reinforce it by frankness in speaking out invidious truths, by reproof and by warning. I, for one, greatly doubt whether our national standard of right and wrong has been really so much debased as we are sometimes tempted to think [applause]; and whether the soft money of a sentimental sort of promises to pay has altogether driven out the sterling coin of upright purpose and self-denying fulfilment. [Applause.] I could wish that this belief, almost, provided it did not mislead us into prophesying smooth things, were more general among our cultivated cla.s.s; for the very acceptance of such a belief tends in large measure toward its accomplishment. No finer sentence has come down to us from antiquity, no higher witness was ever borne to the quality of a nation, than in that signal of Nelson's: "England expects every man to do his duty." [Applause.]

Brethren, I thought on this occasion of the centennial celebration of our independence it was fit that some expression should go forth from us that should in some measure give contradiction to the impression that the graduates of Harvard College take a pessimistic view of their country and its inst.i.tutions. [Applause.] Certainly I know that it is not true, and I wish to have that sentiment expressed here. Our college takes no official part in celebrating the nation's first completed century; she who is already half-way through her third has become too grave for these youthful elations. [Laughter.] But she does not forget that in Samuel and John Adams, Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jr., and John Hanc.o.c.k, she did her full share toward making such a commemoration possible. [Applause.] As in 1776, so in 1876, we have sent John Adams to represent us at Philadelphia, and, perhaps with some prescience of what the next century is to effect, we have sent with him Madame Boylston as his colleague [applause]; and it may be that Alma Mater in this has possibly shown a little feminine malice, for it is to a silent congress that she is made her deputy. [Laughter and applause.] And in the hundred years since we a.s.serted for ourselves a separate place and proper name among the nations, our college has been no palsied or atrophied limb in the national organization. To the jurisprudence, to the legislation, the diplomacy, the science, the literature, the art of the country, her contribution has certainly not fallen short of its due proportion. Our triennial catalogue is hung thick with our trophies from many fields. I may say in parenthesis, gentlemen, brethren of the alumni, that I am glad the July number of the "North American Review" is not yet published. In the January number there was so disheartening a report of everything--I am glad to say our religion is excepted, we have grown perhaps in grace--but we had no science, we had none of this and none of the other.

Brethren, we whom these dumb faces on the wall make in imagination the contemporaries of eight generations of men, let us remember, and let us inculcate on those who are to fill the places that so soon shall know us no more, let us remember, I say, that if man seem to survive himself and to be mutely perpetuated in these fragile semblances, it is only the stamp of the soul that is eternally operative; it is only the image of ourselves that we have left in some sphere of intellectual or moral achievement, that is indelible, that becomes a part of the memory of mankind, reproductive and beneficent, inspiring and admonitory.

But, brethren, as Charles Lamb said of Coleridge's motto, _Sermoni propriori_, this is more proper for a sermon than for a dinner-table.

But birthdays, after all, gentlemen, are serious things; and as the chance of many more of them becomes precarious, and the approaching birthday of the nation begets in all of us, I should hope, something of a grave and meditative mood, it would be an indecorum to break in upon it too suddenly with the licensed levity of festival. You are waiting to hear other voices, and I trust my example of gravity may act rather as a warning than as precedent to those who are to follow me.

Brethren, at our table there is always one toast, that by custom and propriety takes precedence of all others. It is, I admit, rather an arduous task to pay the most many-sided man a different compliment year after year, and the President of the University must pardon me for saying that he gives a good deal of trouble to the President of the Alumni, as he is apt to do in the case of inefficient persons generally.

[Laughter and applause.] One eminent quality, however, I can ill.u.s.trate in a familiar Latin quotation, which, with your permission, I will put in two ways, thus securing, I should hope, the understanding of the older and younger among you: "_Justum et tenacem propositi virum_." [Mr.

Lowell evoked considerable laughter by p.r.o.nouncing the Latin according to the continental method.] I give you the health of President Eliot.

THE STAGE

[Speech of James Russell Lowell at a breakfast given to American actors at the Savage Club, London, August, 1880. Charles d.i.c.kens [the son of the novelist] occupied the post of chairman and called upon Mr. Lowell to respond to the toast proposed in his honor: "The Health of the American Minister."]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--In listening to the kind words and still more in hearing the name of the gentleman who was kind enough to propose the toast to which I am replying, I cannot help recalling the words of one of your English poets:--

"Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!"

I was honored with the acquaintance, in some sort, I may say, with the friendship of the father of the gentleman who proposed my name, and before saying anything further you will allow me to remark that my countrymen are always ready to recognize the hereditary claims when based upon hereditary merit. ["Hear! Hear!"]

Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to me to be here, but in some sense I regard it also as a kind of duty to be present on any occasion when the star-spangled banner and the red cross of England hang opposite each other, in friendly converse. May they never hang opposite each other in any other spirit. [Cheers.] I say so because I think it is the duty of any man who in any sense represents one of the English-speaking races, to be present on an occasion which indicates, as this does, that we are one in all those great principles which lie at the basis of civilized society--never mind what the form of government may be.

As I sat here, gentlemen, endeavoring to collect my thoughts and finding it, I may say, as difficult as to make a collection for any other charitable occasion [laughter], I could not help thinking that the Anglo-Saxon race--if you will allow me to use an expression which is sometimes criticised--that the Anglo-Saxon race has misinterpreted a familiar text of Scripture and reads it: "Out of the fulness of the mouth the heart speaketh." I confess that if Alexander, who once offered a reward for a new pleasure, were to come again upon earth, I should become one of the compet.i.tors for the prize, and I should offer for his consideration a festival at which there were no speeches. [Laughter.]

The gentlemen of your profession have in one sense a great advantage over the rest of us. Your speeches are prepared for you by the cleverest men of your time or by the great geniuses for all time. You can be witty or wise at much less expense than those of us who are obliged to fall back upon our own resources. Now I admit that there is a great deal in the spur of the moment, but that depends very much upon the flank of the animal into which you dig it. There is also a great deal in that self-possessed extemporaneousness which a man carries in his pocket on a sheet of paper. It reminds one of the compliment which the Irishman paid to his own weapon, the shillalah, when he said: "It's a weapon which never misses fire." But then it may be said that it applies itself more directly to the head than to the heart. I think I have a very capital theory of what an after-dinner speech should be; we have had some examples this afternoon and I have made a great many excellent ones myself; but they were always on the way home, and after I had made a very poor one when I was on my legs. [Laughter.] My cabman has been the confidant of an amount of humor and apt quotations and clever sayings which you will never know, and which you will never guess. But something in what has been said by one of my countrymen recalls to my mind a matter of graver character. As a man who has lived all his life in the country, to my shame be it said I have not been an habitual theatre-goer. I came too late for the elder Kean. My theatrical experience began with f.a.n.n.y Kemble--I forget how many years ago, but more than I care to remember--and I recollect the impression made upon me by her and by her father. I was too young to be critical; I was young enough to enjoy; but I remember that what remained with me and what remains with me still of what I heard and saw, and especially with regard to Charles Kemble, was the perfection of his art. It was not his individual characteristics--though of course I remember those--it was the perfection of his art. My countryman has alluded to the fact that at one time it was difficult for an actor to get a breakfast, much more to have one offered to him; and that recalls to my mind the touching words of the great master of your art, Shakespeare, who in one of his sonnets said:--

"O for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty G.o.ddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means, which public manners breeds: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand; And almost thence my nature is subdu'd To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."

Certainly the consideration in which the theatrical profession is held has risen greatly even within my own recollection. It has risen greatly since the time when Adrienne Lecouvreur was denied burial in that consecrated ground where rakes and demireps could complete the corruption they had begun on earth; and this is due to the fact that it is now looked upon not only by the public in general but by the members of your profession as a fine art. It is perfectly true that the stage has often lent itself, I will not say to the demoralization of the public, but to things which I think none of us would altogether approve.

This, however, I think has been due, more to the fact that it not only holds up the mirror to nature, but that the stage is a mirror in which the public itself is reflected. And the public itself is to blame if the stage is ever degraded. [Cheers.]

It has been to men of my profession, perhaps, that the degradation has been due, more than to those who represent their plays. They have interpreted, perhaps in too literal a sense, the famous saying of Dryden that

"He who lives to write, must write to live."

But I began with the Irishman's weapon and I shall not forget that among its other virtues is its brevity, and as in the list of toasts which are to follow I caught the name of a son of him who was certainly the greatest poet, though he wrote in prose, and who perhaps possessed the most original mind that America has given to the world, I shall, I am sure, with your entire approbation make way for the next speaker.

[Applause.]