THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IN MEMORY OF Professor Aram Torossian l88U-19lil * tjje same &utljor. POEMS. Cabinet Edition. i8mo, $1.00. Household Edition. With Portrait. 12010,51.75. THK SAME. 12010, full gilt, $2.25. Red-Line Edition. Illustrated. Small 4to, $2.50. Blue and Gold Edition. 2 vols. 32mo, $2.50. Illustrated Library Edition. With Portrait. 8vo, $3.50. VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. Illustrated. Small 4 to, $2.00. THE BIGLOW PAPERS. Series I. and II. i2mo, each $1.50. THE SAME. In Riverside Aldine Series. i6mo, each $1.00. THREE MEMORIAL POEMS. i6mo, $1.25. THE ROSE. Illustrated. $1.50. FIRESIDE TRAVELS, izmo, $1.50. THE SAME. In Riverside Aldine Series. i6mo, $1.00. AMONG MY BOOKS. Series I. and II. i2mo, each $2.00. MY STUDY WINDOWS, xarno, $2.00. COMPLETE WORKS. 5 vols. 12 mo, $9.00. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. In "American Men of Letters" Series. i6mo, $1.25. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers, BOSTON AND NEW YORK. DEMOCRACY AND OTHER ADDRESSES BY JAMES RUSSELL ^LOWELL BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1887 Copyright, 1886, Br JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. AU rights reserved. FIFTH THOUSAND The Riverside Press, Cambridge: Electrotype* and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. GIFT d*, To G. W. SMALLEY, ESQ. MY DEAR SMALLEY, You heard several of these Addresses delivered, and were good enough to think better of them than I did. As this was one of my encouragements to repeat them before a larger audience, perhaps you will accept the dedication of the volume which contains them. Faithfully yours, J. R. LOWELL. DEERFOOT FARM, November 10. 1886. 902 CONTENTS. PAGE DEMOCRACY 1 INAUGURAL ADDRESS ON ASSUMING THE PRESI DENCY OF THE BIRMINGHAM AND MIDLAND IN STITUTE, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, 6 OCTOBER, 1884. GARFIELD 43 SPOKEN ON THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT GAR- FIELD AT THE MEMORIAL MEETING IN EXETER HALL, LONDON, 24 SEPTEMBER, 1881. STANLEY 57 SPEECH AT THE MEETING IN THE CHAPTER HOUSE OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY IN COMMEMO RATION OF DEAN STANLEY, 13 DECEMBER, 1881. FIELDING 65 ADDRESS ON UNVEILING THE BUST OF FIELD ING, DELIVERED AT SHIRE HALL, TAUNTON, SOMERSETSHIRE, ENGLAND, 4 SEPTEMBER, 1883. COLERIDGE 89 ADDRESS ON UNVEILING THE BUST OF COLE RIDGE AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 7 MAY, 1885. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES 105 ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN CHELSEA, MASSACHUSETTS, 22 DE CEMBER, 1885. WORDSWORTH 135 ADDRESS AS PRESIDENT OF THE WORDS WORTH SOCIETY, 10 MAY, 1884. vi CONTENTS. DON QUIXOTE 157 NOTES READ AT THE WORKINGMEN S COLLEGE, GREAT ORMOND STREET, LONDON. HARVARD ANNIVERSARY 187 ADDRESS DELIVERED IN SANDERS THEATRE, CAMBRIDGE, NOVEMBER 8, 1886, ON THE Two HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDATION OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY. DEMOCRACY. INAUGURAL ADDRESS ON ASSUMING THE PRESIDENCY OF THE BIRMINGHAM AND MIDLAND INSTITUTE, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, 6 OCTOBER, 1884. DEMOCRACY. HE must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose be ing is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified re siduum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves to be called an opin ion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it. And in a world 4 DEMOCRACY. of daily nay, almost hourly journalism, where every clever man, every man who thinks himself clever, or whom anybody else thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point-blank and at the word of command on every conceivable subject of human thought, or, on what sometimes seems to him very much the same thing, on every inconceivable display of human want of thought, there is such a spendthrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish the permitted staple of public discourse that there is little chance of beguiling a new tune out of the one-stringed instrument on which we have been thrumming so long. In this desperate necessity one is often tempted to think that, if all the words of the diction ary were tumbled down in a heap and then all those fortuitous juxtapositions and com binations that made tolerable sense were picked out and pieced together, we might find among them some poignant suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. But, alas ! it is only the great poets who seem to have this unsolicited profusion of unexpected and incalculable phrase, this in finite variety of topic. For everybody else everything has been said before, and said DEMOCRACY. 5 over again after. He who has read his Aris totle will be apt to think that observation has on most points of general applicability said its last word, and he who has mounted the tower of Plato to look abroad from it will never hope to climb another with so lofty a vantage of speculation. Where it is so simple if not so easy a thing to hold one s peace, why add to the general confusion of tongues ? There is something disheartening, too, in being expected to fill up not less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind were an hour-glass, that need only be shaken and set on one end or the other, as the case may be, to run its allotted sixty minutes with decorous exactitude. I recollect being once told by the late eminent naturalist Agassiz that when he was to deliver his first lecture as professor (at Zurich, I believe) he had grave doubts of his ability to occupy the pre scribed three quarters of an hour. He was speaking without notes, and glancing anx iously from time to time at the watch that lay before him on the desk. " When I had spoken a half hour," he said, " I had told them everything I knew in the world, every thing! Then I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly, " and I have done nothing 6 DEMOCRACY. else ever since." Beneath the humorous ex aggeration of the story I seemed to see the face of a very serious and improving moral. And yet if one were to say only what he had to say and then stopped, his audience would feel defrauded of their honest meas ure. Let us take courage by the example of the French, whose exportation of Bor deaux wines increases as the area of their land in vineyards is diminished. To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, the undelayable year has rolled round, and I find myself called upon to say something in this place, where so many wiser men have spoken before me. Precluded in my quality of national guest, by motives of taste and discretion, from dealing with any question of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to me wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic of comparatively abstract interest, and to ask your indulgence for a few somewhat generalized remarks on a matter concerning which I had some ex perimental knowledge, derived from the use of such eyes and ears as Nature had been pleased to endow me withal, and such re port as I had been able to win from them. The subject which most readily suggested DEMOCRACY. 7 itself was the spirit and the working of those conceptions of life and polity which are lumped together whether for reproach or commendation under the name of Democ racy. By temperament and education of a conservative turn, I saw the last years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers saw with delighted amazement a century ago, and have watched the change (to me a sad one) from an agricultural to a proletary population. The testimony of Balaam should carry some conviction. I have grown to manhood and am now growing old with the growth of this system of government in my native land, have watched its advances, or what some would call its encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those of a glacier, have been an ear-witness to the forebodings of wise and good and timid men, and have lived to see those forebodings belied by the course of events, which is apt to show itself humorously careless of the reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing a sagacious old gentleman say in 1840 that the doing away with the property qualification for suf frage twenty years before had been the ruin of the State of Massachusetts ; that it had put public credit and private estate alike at 8 DEMOCRACY. the mercy of demagogues. I lived to see that Commonwealth twenty odd years later paying the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith, and that while suf fering an unparalleled drain of men and treasure in helping to sustain the unity and self-respect of the nation. If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger cities, as it certainly has, this has been mainly because the hands that wielded it were untrained to its use. There the elec tion of a majority of the trustees of the pub lic money is controlled by the most ignorant and vicious of a population which has come to us from abroad, wholly unpractised in self-government and incapable of assimila tion by American habits and methods. But the finances of our towns, where the native tradition is still dominant and whose affairs are discussed and settled in a public assem bly of the people, have been in general hon estly and prudently administered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a majority of the voters live by their daily wages, it is not so often the recklessness as the moderation of public expenditure that surprises an old- fashioned observer. " The beggar is in the DEMOCRACY. 9 saddle at last," cries Proverbial Wisdom. " Why, in the name of all former experience, does n t he ride to the Devil ? " Because in the very act of mounting he ceased to be a beggar and became part owner of the piece of property he bestrides. The last thing we need be anxious about is property. It al ways has friends or the means of making them. If riches have wings to fly away from their owner, they have wings also to escape danger. I hear America sometimes playfully ac cused of sending you all your storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do this be cause, in virtue of our protective system, we can afford to make better bad weather than anybody else. And what wiser use could we make of it than to export it in return for the paupers which some European countries are good enough to send over to us who have not attained to the same skill in the manufac ture of them ? But bad weather is not the worst thing that is laid at our door. A French gentleman, not long ago, forgetting Burke s monition of how unwise it is to draw an indictment against a whole people, has charged us with the responsibility of what- 10 DEMOCRACY. ever he finds disagreeable in the morals or manners of his countrymen. If M. Zola or some other competent witness would only go into the box and tell us what those morals and manners were before our example cor rupted them ! But I confess that I find lit tle to interest and less to edify me in these international bandyings of " You re an other." I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of offences of which we are more or less gravely accused, because that really includes all the rest. It is that we are infecting the Old World with what seems to be thought the entirely new disease of Democracy. It is generally people who are in what are called easy circumstances who can afford the leisure to treat thenj.- selves to a handsome complaint, and these experience an immediate alleviation when once they have found a sonorous Greek name to abuse it by. There is something consola tory also, something flattering to their sense of personal dignity, and to that conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil from our uneasy consciousness of being common place, in thinking ourselves victims of a malady by which no one had ever suffered DEMOCRACY. 11 before. Accordingly they find it simpler to class under one comprehensive heading what ever they find offensive to their nerves, their tastes, their interests, or what they suppose to be their opinions, and christen it Democ racy, much as physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross-grained fellows lay their ill-temper to the weather. But is it really a new ailment, and, if it be, is Amer ica answerable for it ? Even if she were, would it account for the phylloxera, and hoof-and-mouth disease, and bad harvests, and bad English, and the German bands, and the Boers, and all the other discomforts with which these later days have vexed the souls of them that go in chariots? Yet I have seen the evil example of Democracy in America cited as the source and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite as little connected with it by any sequence of cause and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing new. It has been at work for cen turies, and we are more conscious of it only because in this age of publicity, where the newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a grievance, or fancies that he has, the bubbles and scum thrown up by it are more notice able on the surface than in those dumb ages 12 DEMOCRACY. when there was a cover of silence and sup pression on the cauldron. Bernardo Nava- gero, speaking of the Provinces of Lower Austria in 1546, tells us that " in them there are five sorts of persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of these last no account is made, because they have no voice in the Diet" l Nor was it among the people that subver sive or mistaken doctrines had their rise. A Father of the Church said that property was theft many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montes quieu was the inventor of national work shops, and of the theory that the State owed every man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the first organized Democ racy? A few centuries ago the chief end of man was to keep his soul alive, and then the little kernel of leaven that sets the gases 1 Below the peasants, it should be remembered, was still another even more helpless class, the servile farm- laborers. The same witness informs us that of the ex traordinary imposts the Peasants paid nearly twice as much in proportion to their estimated property as the Barons, Nobles, and Burghers together. Moreover, the upper classes were assessed at their own valuation, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the Peasants who had no voice. (Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti, Serie L, tomo L, pp. 378, 379, 389.) DEMOCRACY. 13 at work was religious, and produced the Reformation. Even in that, far-sighted per sons like the Emperor Charles V. saw the germ of political and social revolution. Now that the chief end of man seems to have be come the keeping of the body alive, and as comfortably alive as possible, the leaven also has become wholly political and social. But there had also been social upheavals before the Reformation and contemporane ously with it, especially among men of Teu tonic race. The Reformation gave outlet and direction to an unrest already existing. Formerly the immense majority of men our brothers knew only their sufferings, their wants, and their desires. They are be ginning now to know their opportunity and their power. All persons who see deeper than their plates are rather inclined to thank God for it than to bewail it, for the sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against which Dives has no antidote. There can be no doubt that the specta cle of a great and prosperous Democracy on the other side of the Atlantic must react powerfully on the aspirations and political theories of men in the Old World who do not find things to their mind ; but, whether 14 DEMOCRACY. for good or evil, it should not be overlooked that the acorn from which it sprang was ripened on the British oak. Every suc cessive swarm that has gone out from this officina gentium has, when left to its own instincts may I not call them hereditary instincts ? assumed a more or less thor oughly democratic form. This would seem to show, what I believe to be the fact, that the British Constitution, under whatever disguises of prudence or decorum, is essen tially democratic. England, indeed, may be called a monarchy with democratic tenden cies, the United States a democracy with con servative instincts. People are continually saying that America is in the air, and I am glad to think it is, since this means only that a clearer conception of human claims and human duties is beginning to be preva lent. The discontent with the existing order of things, however, pervaded the atmosphere wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America. I say wherever the con ditions were favorable, for it is certain that the germs of disease do not stick or find a prosperous field for their development and DEMOCRACY. 15 noxious activity unless where the simplest sanitary precautions have been neglected. " For this effect defective comes by cause," as Polonius said long ago. It is only by in stigation of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous. It is then only that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are danger ous, but the revolts of intelligence : The wicked and the weak rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion. Had the governing classes in France during the last century paid as much heed to their proper business as to their pleasures or man ners, the guillotine need never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and secular tradition through which in a normally con stituted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only when the reasonable and practicable are denied that men demand the unreasonable and impracticable ; only when the possible is made difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor. No ; the sentiment which lies at the root of de mocracy is nothing new. I am speaking al- 16 DEMOCRACY. ways of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of a form of government ; for this was but the outgrowth of the other and not its cause. This sentiment is merely an expression of the natural wish of people to have a hand, if need be a controlling hand, in the man agement of their own affairs. What is new is that they are more and more gaining that control, and learning more and more how to be worthy of it. What we used to call the tendency or drift what we are being taught to call more wisely the evolution of things has for some time been setting steadily in this direction. There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argu ment, though it be sometimes the gunpow der to drive one home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet comes of what nurses and other experienced persons call grow ing-pains, and need not seriously alarm us. DEMOCRACY. 17 They are what every generation before us certainly every generation since the in vention of printing has gone through with more or less good fortune. To the door of every generation there comes a knocking, and unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor and his wife, have been doing some deed without a name, they need not shudder. It turns out at worst to be a poor relation who wishes to come in out of the cold. The porter always grumbles and is slow to open " Who s there, in the name of Beelze bub ? " he mutters. Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it, have not prophesied with the alderman that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on the contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches itself, and goes about its business as if nothing had happened. Suppression of the slave trade, abolition of slavery, trade unions, at all of these excel lent people shook their heads despondingly, and murmured " Ichabod." But the trade unions are now debating instead of conspir ing, and we all read their discussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are learn- 18 DEMOCRACY. ing the business of citizenship and the diffi culties of practical legislation. One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipa tion of the Jews. All share in the govern ment of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in it the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature a race in which ability seems as natural and heredi tary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion. We drove them into a corner, but they had their re venge, as the wronged are always sure to have it sooner or later. They made their corner the counter and banking-house of the world, and thence they rule it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance. Your grandfa thers mobbed Priestley only that you might set up his statue and make Birmingham the headquarters of English Unitarianism. We hear it said sometimes that this is an age of transition, as if that made matters clearer ; but can any one point us to an age DEMOCRACY. 19 that was not ? If he could, he would show us an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it has been for all before us, is to make the transition gradual and easy, to see that our points are right so that the train may not come to grief. For we should remember that nothing is more natural for people whose education has been neglected than to spell evolution with an initial " r." A great man struggling with the storms of fate has been called a sublime spectacle ; but surely a great man wrestling with these new forces that have come into the world, master ing them and controlling them to benefi cent ends, would be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there were it would be only a better school of manhood, a nobler scope for ambition. I have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and consequences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men s conceptions of life, and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct to endanger the rights of prop erty and possession. But I believe that the real gravamen of the charges lies in the 20 DEMOCRACY. habit it has of making itself generally dis agreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most inconvenient moment whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this inevitable ques tion, they need feel in no way discomfited by it. Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefinite- ness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual mo tion in politics any more than in mechanics. President Lincoln defined democracy to be " the government of the people by the peo ple for the people." This is a sufficiently compact statement of it as a political ar rangement. Theodore Parker said that " Democracy meant not I m as good as you are, but 4 You re as good as I am. " DEMOCRACY. 21 And this is the ethical conception of it, nec essary as a complement of the other ; a con ception which, could it be made actual and practical, would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from the beginning, and which mankind have shown such a sin gular talent for answering wrongly. In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled, so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful and profound parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen tells us that " One knocked at the Beloved s door, and a voice asked from within Who is there ? and he answered 4 It is I. Then the voice said, This house will not hold me and thee ; and the door was not opened. Then went the lover into the desert and fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he returned and knocked again at the door ; and again the voice asked Who is there ? and he said It is thyself ; and the door was opened to him." But that is idealism, you will say, and this is an only too practical world. I grant it ; 22 DEMOCRACY. but I am one of those who believe that the real will never find an irremovable basis till it rests on the ideal. It used to be thought that a democracy was possible only in a small territory, and this is doubtless true of a democracy strictly defined, for in such all the citizens decide directly upon every ques tion of public concern in a general assem bly. An example still survives in the tiny Swiss canton of Appenzell. But this imme diate intervention of the people in their own affairs is not of the essence of democracy ; it is not necessary, nor indeed, in most cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr. Lin coln s definition would fairly enough apply have existed, and now exist, in which, though the supreme authority reside in the people, yet they can act only indirectly on the na tional policy. This generation has seen a democracy with an imperial figurehead, and in all that have ever existed the body politic has never embraced all the inhabitants in cluded within its territory, the right to share in the direction of affairs has been confined to citizens, and citizenship has been further restricted by various limitations, sometimes of property, sometimes of nativity, and al ways of age and sex. DEMOCRACY. 23 The framers of the American Constitu tion were far from wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every ex pansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direc tion. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innova tion of theory ; in fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fal lacy that a new system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of ordering a ii^w suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and ex perience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the value of tradition and abit as the great allies of permanence and stability. They all had that distaste for in novation which belonged to their race, and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed. The day of senti ment was over, and no dithyrambic affirma tions or fine-drawn analyses of the Rights of Man would serve their present turn. This 24 DEMOCRACY. was a practical question, and they addressed themselves to it as men of knowledge and judgment should. Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and they solved it with singular discretion. They put as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the way of the people s will, but of their whim. With few exceptions they prob ably admitted the logic of the then accepted syllogism, democracy, anarchy, despotism. But this formula was framed upon the expe rience of small cities shut up to stew within their narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where every passion was reverberated from house to house and from man to man with gathering rumor till every impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophis try to turn it into a mob, all the more dan gerous because sanctified with the formality of law. 1 1 The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing- this trooping of emotion and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The effect of Darwinism as a disintegra tor of humanitarianism is also to be reckoned with. DEMOCRACY. 25 Fortunately their case was wholly different. They were to legislate for a widely-scattered population and for States already practised in the discipline of a partial independence. They had an unequalled opportunity and enormous advantages. The material they had to work upon was already democratical >y instinct and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by more than a century s schooling in self-government. They had but to give permanent and conservative form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and di rection to their new institutions, especially in supplying them with checks and balances, they had a great help and safeguard in their federal organization. The different, some times conflicting, interests and social systems of the several States made existence as a Union and coalescence into a nation condi tional on a constant practice of moderation and compromise. The very elements of dis integration were the best guides in political training. Their children learned the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the application of it to a question of fundamen tal morals that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof ; that it is 26 DEMOCRACY. a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in states manship. Has not the trial of democracy in Amer ica proved, on the whole, successful ? If it had not, would the Old World be vexed with any fears of its proving contagious ? This trial would have been less severe could it have been made with a people homogene ous in race, language, and traditions, whereas the United States have been called on to absorb and assimilate enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous in all these respects, and drawn mainly from that class which might fairly say that the world was not their friend, nor the world s law. The previous condition too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, landing in New York and asked what his politics were, inquired if there was a Government there, and on being told that there was, retorted, " Thin I m agin it ! " We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most ignorant, the most turbulent of her people, and have made them over into good citizens, who have added to our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence of a country and of institutions which they know to be worth dying for. DEMOCRACY. 27 The exceptions have been (and they are lamentable exceptions) where these hordes of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great cities. But the social system is yet to seek which has not to look the same terrible wolf in the eyes. On the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are buying up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts, and making them productive again by the same virtues of industry and thrift that once made them profitable to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting them. To have achieved even these prosaic results (if you choose to call them so), and that out of ma terials the most discordant, I might say the most recalcitrant, argues a certain be neficent virtue in the system that could do it, and is not to be accounted for by mere luck. Carlyle said scornfully that America meant only roast turkey every day for every body. He forgot that States, as Bacon said of wars, go on their bellies. As for the security of property, it should be tolerably well secured in a, country where every other man hopes to be rich, even though the only property qualification be the ownership of two hands that add to the general wealth. Is it not the best security for anything to 28 DEMOCRACY. interest the largest possible number of per sons in its preservation and the smallest in its division? In point of fact, far-seeing men count the increasing power of wealth and its combinations as one of the chief dan gers with which the institutions of the United States are threatened in the not distant fu ture. The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization as hitherto understood, but I am a little im patient of being told that property is enti tled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the State. It bears those, indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. Wealth should not forget this, for poverty is beginning to think of it now and then. Let me not be misunderstood. I see as clearly as any man possibly can, and rate as highly, the value of wealth, and of heredi tary wealth, as the security of refinement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and beautify life, and as making a country worth living in. Many an ancestral hall here in England has been a nursery of that culture which has been of example and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue which DEMOCRACY. 29 new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting. I should not think of coming before you to defend or to criticise any form of govern ment. All have their virtues, all their de fects, and all have illustrated one period or another in the history of the race, with sig nal services to humanity and culture. There is not one that could stand a cynical cross- examination by an experienced criminal law yer, except that of a perfectly wise and per fectly good despot, such as the world has never seen, except in that white-haired king of Browning s, who Lived long ago In the morning of the world, When Earth was nearer Heaven than now." The English race, if they did not invent government by discussion, have at least car ried it nearest to perfection in practice. It seems a very safe and reasonable contrivance for occupying the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while before it found the change for a convincing reply. 30 DEMOCRACY. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at Westminster and Washington or in the editors rooms of the leading journals, so thoroughly is everything debated before the authorized and responsible debaters get on their legs. And what shall we say of government by a majority of voices ? To a person who in the last century would have called himself an Impartial Observer, a nu merical preponderance seems, on the whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth as could well be devised, but experience has appar ently shown it to be a convenient arrange ment for determining what may be expedi ent or advisable or practicable at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too te dious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bot tom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better- looking than he had imagined. The arguments against universal suffrage are equally unanswerable. " What," we ex claim, " shall Tom, Dick, and Harry have as DEMOCRACY. 31 much weight in the scale as I ? " Of course, nothing could be more absurd. And yet universal suffrage has not been the instru ment of greater unwisdom than contrivances of a more select description. Assemblies could be mentioned composed entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity which have sometimes shown traces of hu man passion or prejudice in their votes. Have the Serene Highnesses and Enlight ened Classes carried on the business of Man kind so well, then, that there is no use in try ing a less costly method ? The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety- valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, " Is it wise to give every man the ballot? " but rather the practical one, " Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer ? " It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads. At any rate this is the di- 32 DEMOCRACY. lemma to which the drift of opinion has been for some time sweeping us, and in politics a dilemma is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns than a wolf by the ears. It is said that the right of suffrage is not valued when it is indiscriminately bestowed, and there may be some truth in this, for I have observed that what men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral. But is there not dan ger that it will be valued at more than its worth if denied, and that some illegitimate way will be sought to make up for the want of it ? Men who have a voice in public af fairs are at once affiliated with one or other of the great parties between which society is divided, merge their individual hopes and opinions in its safer, because more general ized, hopes and opinions, are disciplined by its tactics, and acquire, to a certain degree, the orderly qualities of an army. They no longer belong to a class, but to a body cor porate. Of one thing, at least, we may be certain, that, under whatever method of help ing things to go wrong man s wit can con trive, those who have the divine right to gov ern will be found to govern in the end, and that the highest privilege to which the ma- DEMOCRACY. 33 jority of mankind can aspire is that of being governed by those wiser than they. Uni versal suffrage has in the United States sometimes been made the instrument of in considerate changes, under the notion of re form, and this from a misconception of the true meaning of popular government. One of these has been the substitution in many of the States of popular election for official selection in the choice of judges. The same system applied to military officers was the source of much evil during our civil war, and, I believe, had to be abandoned. But it has been also true that on all great ques tions of national policy a reserve of prudence and discretion has been brought out at the critical moment to turn the scale in favor of a wiser decision. An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run. It is, perhaps, true that, by effacing the principle of passive obedi ence, democracy, ill understood, has slack ened the spring of that ductility to discipline which is essential to " the unity and married calm of States." But I feel assured that ex perience and necessity will cure this evil, as they have shown their power to cure others. And under what frame of policy have evils 34 DEMOCRACY. ever been remedied till they became intoler able, and shook men out of their indolent indifference through their fears ? We are told that the inevitable result of democracy is to sap the foundations of per sonal independence, to weaken the principle of authority, to lessen the respect due to em inence, whether in station, virtue, or genius. If these things were so, society could not hold together. Perhaps the best forcing- house of robust individuality would be where public opinion is inclined to be most over bearing, as he must be of heroic temper who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the Season in a soft hat. As for author ity, it is one of the symptoms of the time that the religious reverence for it is declining everywhere, but this is due partly to the fact that statecraft is no longer looked upon as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay of superstition, by which I mean the habit of respecting what we are told to respect rather than what is respectable in itself. There is more rough and tumble in the American democracy than is altogether agreeable to people of sensitive nerves and refined habits, and the people take their po litical duties lightly and laughingly, as is, DEMOCRACY. 35 perhaps, neither unnatural nor unbecoming in a young giant. Democracies can no more jump away from their own shadows than the rest of us can. They no doubt sometimes make mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve it. But they do this because they believe them worthy of it, and though it be true that the idol is the measure of the worshipper, yet the worship has in it the germ of a nobler religion. But is it democracies alone that fall into these errors ? I, who have seen it proposed to erect a statue to Hudson, the railway king, and have heard Louis Napoleon hailed as the saviour of society by men who certainly had no democratic associations or leanings, am not ready to think so. But democracies have likewise their finer instincts. I have also seen the wisest statesman and most pregnant speaker of our generation, a man of bumble birth and ungainly manners, of little culture beyond what his own genius supplied, become more absolute in power than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his countrymen for his hon esty, his wisdom, his sincerity, his faith in God and man, and the nobly humane sim plicity of his character. And I remember 36 DEMOCRACY. another whom popular respect enveloped as with a halo, the least vulgar of men, the most austerely genial, and the most inde pendent of opinion. Wherever he went he never met a stranger, but everywhere neigh bors and friends proud of him as their or nament and decoration. Institutions which could bear and breed such men as Lincoln and Emerson had surely some energy for good. No, amid all the fruitless turmoil and miscarriage of the world, if there be one thing steadfast and of favorable omen, one thing to make optimism distrust its own ob scure distrust, it is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beau tiful than themselves. The touchstone of political and social institutions is their abil ity to supply them with worthy objects of this sentiment, which is the very tap-root of civilization and progress. There would seem to be no readier way of feeding it with the elements of growth and vigor than such an organization of society as will enable men to respect themselves, and so to justify them in respecting others. Such a result is quite possible under other conditions than those of an avowedly demo- cratical Constitution. For I take it that the DEMOCRACY. 37 real essence of democracy was fairly enough defined by the First Napoleon when he said that the French Revolution meant " la car- riere ouverte aux talents " a clear path way for merit of whatever kind. I should be inclined to paraphrase this by calling de mocracy that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man had a chance and knew that he had it. If a man can climb, and feels himself encour aged to climb, from a coalpit to the highest position for which he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent what name is given to the government under which he lives. The Bailli of Mirabeau, uncle of the more famous tribune of that name, wrote in 1771 : " The English are, in my opinion, a hundred times more agitated and more unfortunate than the very Algerines themselves, because they do not know and will not know till the destruction of their over-swollen power, which I believe very near, whether they are monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, and wish to play the part of all three." Eng land has not been obliging enough to fulfil the Bailli s prophecy, and perhaps it was this very carelessness about the name, and concern about the substance of popular gov- 38 DEMOCRACY. ernment, this skill in getting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all the mo tives which influence men, and in giving one direction to many impulses, that has been a principal factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an unwritten Constitution, for men are prone to be tinker ing the work of their own hands, whereas they are more willing to let time and circum stance mend or modify what time and cir cumstance have made. All free govern ments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epigram matic terseness, bids you educate your future rulers. But would this alone be a sufficient safeguard? To educate the intelligence is DEMOCRACY. 39 to enlarge the horizon of its desires and wants. And it is well that this should be so. But the enterprise must go deeper and prepare the way for satisfying those desires and wants in so far as they are legitimate. What is really ominous of danger to the existing order of things is not democracy (which, properly understood, is a conserva tive force), but the Socialism, which may find a fulcrum in it. If we cannot equalize con ditions and fortunes any more than we can equalize the brains of men and a very sagacious person has said that " where two men ride of a horse one must ride behind " we can yet, perhaps, do something to cor rect those methods and influences that lead to enormous inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enormous. It is all very well to pooh-pooh Mr. George and to prove him mistaken in his political economy. I do not believe that land should be divided because the quantity of it is limited by nature. Of what may this not be said ? A fortiori, we might on the same principle insist on a divi sion of human wit, for I have observed that the quantity of this has been even more inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an inequitably large share of it. But he 40 DEMOCRACY. is right in his impelling motive ; right, also, I am convinced, in insisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most important part, of political economy; and in thinking man to be of more concern and more con vincing than the longest columns of figures in the world. For unless you include hu man nature in your addition, your total is sure to be wrong and your deductions from it fallacious. Communism means barba rism, but Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and community of interests, sym pathy, the giving to the hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must com bine to produce means, in short, the prac tical application of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction. State Socialism would cut off the very roots in personal character self-help, forethought, and frugality which nourish and sustain the trunk and branches of every vigorous Commonwealth. I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of man kind that the state of things into which they DEMOCRACY. 41 are born is a part of the order of the uni verse, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a convic tion that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good that you must Be your own palace or the world s your gaol. But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of thought, thought must find a remedy somewhere. There has been no pe riod of time in which wealth has been more sensible of its duties than now. It builds hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it endows schools. It is one of the advantages of accumulated wealth, and of the leisure it renders possible, that people have time to think of the wants and sorrows of their fellows. But all these remedies are partial and palliative merely. It is as if we should apply plasters to a single pustule of the small-pox with a view of driving out the disease. The true way is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now con- 42 DEMOCRACY. stituted these are in the air it breathes, in the water it drinks, in things that seem, and which it has always believed, to be the most innocent and healthful. The evil elements it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute them in their courses. Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be re vealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity. GARFIELD. SPOKEN ON THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD AT THE MEMORIAL MEETING IN EXETER HALL, LONDON, 24 SEPTEMBER, 1881. GARFIELD. INTRODUCTORY NOTE.* ONE thing and one only makes the record of the meeting at Exeter Hall on the 24th Septem ber worthy of separate publication, and confers on it a certain distinction. Not what was said, but where it was said, in unison with what other voices, and in what atmosphere of sympathy, as spontaneous as it was universal, gives to the words spoken here their true point and emphasis. Never before have Americans, speaking in Eng land, felt so clearly that they were in the land, not only of their fathers, but of their brethren, Their elder brothers, but one in blood. For the first time their common English tongue found its true office when Mother and Daughter spoke comforting words to each other over a sor row, which, if nearer to one, was shared by both. English blood, made up of the best drops from 1 Printed first as a preface to the memorial volume, containing a record of the proceedings at the Exeter Hall meeting. 46 GARFIELD. the veins of many conquering, organizing, and colonizing races, is a blood to be proud of, and most plainly vindicates its claim to dominion when it recognizes kinship through sympathy with what is simple, steadfast, and religious in character. When we learn to respect each other for the good qualities in each, we are helping to produce and foster them. It is often said that sentimental motives never guide or modify the policy of nations, and it is no doubt true that statecraft more and more means business, and not sentiment ; yet men as old as the late Lord Stratford de Redcliffe could remember at least two occasions during their lives when a sentiment, and that, too, a literary sentiment, had much to do with the shaping of events and the new birth of nations. We would not over-estimate the permanent value of this out burst of feeling on both sides the sea, of this grasp of the hand across a recent grave, but we may safely affirm that they were genuine, and had, therefore, something of the enduring virtue that belongs to what is genuine, and to that only. It is something that two great nations have looked at each other kindly through their tears. It will at least be more awkward to quarrel here after. The sight of the British flag at half-mast on the day of an American funeral was something to set men thinking, and that fruitfully, of the great duty that is laid upon the English race GARFIELD. 47 among mankind. Well may we be proud of the Ancient Mother, and we will see to it that she have no reason to be ashamed of her children. It behoves us Americans who have experienced nothing but the kindness and hospitality and sympathy of England, to express thus publicly our sense of them. Especially would we thank the venerable prelate whose address we are per mitted to include in this little volume. And em phatically would we express our conviction that the wreath sent with such touching delicacy of feeling by her Majesty the Queen to be laid upon the bier of President Garfield, will be hung upon a golden nail in the Temple of Concord. Ladies and Gentlemen, Countrymen and Countrywomen, The object of this meet ing, as you all know, is to testify our respect for the character and services of the late President Garfield, and in so doing to offer such consolation as is possible to a noble mother and a noble wife, suffering as few women have been called upon to suffer. It may seem a paradox, but the only alleviation of such grief is a sense of the greatness and costliness of the sacrifice that gave birth to it, and this sense is brought home to us by the measure in which others appreciate our loss. It is no exaggeration to say that the 48 GARFIELD. recent profoundly touching spectacle of wo manly devotedness in its simplicity, its con stancy, and its dignity has moved the heart of mankind in a manner without any pre cedent in living memory. But to Americans everywhere it comes home with a pang of mingled sorrow, pride, and unspeakable do mestic tenderness that none but ourselves can feel. This pang is made more poignant by exile, and yet you will all agree with me in feeling that the universal sympathy ex pressed here by all classes and conditions of men has made us sensible as never before, that, if we are in a strange, we are not in a foreign land, and that if we are not at home we are at least in what Hawthorne so aptly called the Old Home. I should gladly dwell more at length upon this fact, so consoling and so full of all good omen, but I must not infringe on the resolutions which will be presented to you by others. Yet I should do injustice to your feelings, no less than to my own, if I did not offer here our grateful acknowledgments to the august lady who, herself not unacquainted with grief, has shown so repeatedly and so touchingly how true a woman s heart may beat under the royal purple. GARFIELD. 49 On an occasion like this, when we are met together that we may give vent to a common feeling so deep and so earnest as to thrust aside every consideration of self, the wish of us all must be that what is said here should be simple, strong, and manly as the charac ter of the illustrious magistrate so untimely snatched from us in the very seed-time of noble purpose, that would have sprung up in service as noble, that we should be as ten der and true as she has shown herself to be in whose bereavement we reverently claim to share as children of the blessed country that gave birth to him and to her. We can not find words that could reach that lofty level. This is no place for the turnings and windings of dexterous rhetoric. In the presence of that death-scene so homely, so human, so august in its unostentatious hero ism, the commonplaces of ordinary eulogy stammer with the sudden shame of their own ineptitude. Were we allowed to follow the natural promptings of our hearts, we would sum up all praise in the sacred old words, "Well done, thou good and faithful ser vant." That death-scene was more than singular ; it was unexampled. The whole civilized 50 GARFIELD. world was gathered about it in the breath less suspense of anxious solicitude, listened to the difficult breathing, counted the flut tering pulse, was cheered by the momentary rally and saddened by the inevitable relapse. And let us thank God and take courage when we reflect that it was through the man liness, the patience, the religious fortitude of the splendid victim that the tie of human brotherhood was thrilled to a consciousness of its sacred function. The one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin is a touch of heroism, our sympathy with which dignifies and ennobles. Science has wrought no greater marvel in the service of human ity than when it gave the world a common nervous system, and thus made mankind capable of a simultaneous emotion. One remarkable feature of that death- scene was the imperturbable good nature of the sufferer. This has been sometimes called a peculiarly American quality, a weakness if in excess or misapplied, but beautiful in its own genial place, as there and then it was. General Garfield once said to a friend, " They tell me it is a defect of my character, but I cannot hate anybody." Like Socrates, he seemed good-humored even with death, QARFIELD. 51 though there have been few men from whom death has ever wrenched a fairer heritage of opportunity. Physicians tell us that all men die well, but surely he was no ordinary man who could die well daily for eleven agonizing weeks, and of whom it could be said at last, He nothing common did, or mean, Upon that memorable scene. A fibre capable of such strain and wear as that is used only in the making of heroic natures. Twenty years ago General Garfield offered his life to his country, and he has died for her as truly and more fruitfully now than if fate had accepted the offer then. Not only has his blood re-cemented our Union, but the dignity, the patience, the self-restraint, the though tfulness for others, the serene valor which he showed under cir cumstances so disheartening and amid the wreck of hopes so splendid, are a possession and a stimulus to his countrymen forever. The emulation of examples like his makes nations great, and keeps them so. The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in. I had not the honor of any intimacy of 52 GARFIELD. friendship with this noble man. Others will speak of him from more intimate knowledge. I saw him once or twice only, but so deeply was I impressed with the seriousness and solidity of his character, with his eager in terest in worthy objects, and with the states manlike furniture of his mind, that when, many years afterwards, he was nominated for the Presidency I rejoiced in the wisdom of the selection, and found in my memory an image of him clearer than that of any man I ever met of whom I had seen so little. And I may add that I have never known any man concerning whom a loving and ad miring testimony was so uniform from men of every rank and character who had known him. None knew him but to love him, None named him but to praise. I shall not retrace the story of his life, but there is nothing that occurs to me so per fect in its completeness since the Biblical story of Joseph. The poor lad who at thir teen could not read dies at fifty the tenant of an office second in dignity to none on earth, and the world mourns his loss as that of a personal relative. I find the word coming back to my lips in spite of me, " He GARFIELD. 53 was so human" An example of it was his kissing his venerable mother on the day of his inauguration. It was criticised, I re member hearing at the time, as a sin against good taste. I thought then, and think now, that if we had found the story in Plutarch we should have thought no worse of the hero of it. It was this pliability of his to the impulse of unconventional feeling that endeared him so much to his kind. Among the many stories that have been sent me, illustrating the sorrow so universally felt here, none have touched me so much as these two : An old gardener said to his mistress, " Oh, ma am, we felt somehow as if he belonged to us ; " and in a little village on the coast, where an evangelist held nightly services on the beach, prayer was offered regularly for the recovery of the President, the weather- beaten fishermen who stood around the preacher with bowed, uncovered heads fer vently responding, " Amen." You will also be interested to know that the benevolent Sir Moses Montefiore, now in his ninety- seventh year, telegraphed last week to Pales tine to request that prayers might be offered for the President in the synagogues of the 54 GARFIELD. four holy cities. It was no common man who could call forth, and justly call forth, an emotion so universal, an interest so sincere and so humane. I said that this is no place for eulogy. They who deserve eulogy do not need it, and they who deserve it not are diminished by it. The dead at least can bear the truth, and have a right to that highest service of human speech. We are not called upon here to define Garfield s place among the memorable of mankind. A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions. We may surely say of him that the great qualities were there, and were al ways adequate to the need, although, less fortunate than Lincoln, his career was snapped short just as they were about to be tested by the supreme trial of creative states manship. We believe that he would have stood the test, and we have good reason for our faith. For this is certainly true of him, that a life more strenuous, a life of more constantly heightening tendency of fulfil ment, of more salutary and invigorating ex ample, has not been lived in a country that is rich in instances of such. Well may we be proud of him, this brother of ours, recog- GARFIELD. 55 nized also as a brother wherever men honor what is praiseworthy in man. Well may we thank God for him, and love more the country that could produce and appreciate him. Well may we sorrow for his loss, but not as those without hope. Great as the loss is and the loss of faculties trained like his is the hardest of all to replace yet we should show a want of faith in our country if we called it irreparable. Three times within living memory has the Yice-President succeeded to the presidential function with out shock to our system, without detriment to our national honor, and without check to our prosperity. It would be an indignity to discuss here the character of him who is now our chief magistrate, and who, more than any one, it is safe to say, has felt the pain of this blow. But there is no indecorum in saying what is known to all, that he is a gen tleman of culture, of admittedly high intelli gence, of unimpeachable character, of proved administrative ability, and that he enters on his high duties with a full sense of what such a succession implies. I am not one of those who believe that democracy any more than any other form of government will go of itself. I am not a believer in perpetual mo- 56 GARFIELD. tion in politics any more than in mechanics, but, in common with all of you, I have an imperturbable faith in the honesty, the intel ligence, and the good sense of the American people, and in the destiny of the American Republic. STANLEY. SPEECH AT THE MEETING IN THE CHAPTER HOUSE OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY IN COMMEMORATION OF DEAN STANLEY, 13 DECEMBER, 1881. STANLEY. I AM very glad to have the privilege of uniting in this tribute to the memory of the remarkable man whose loss was felt as a personal bereavement by so great and so va rious a multitude of mourners, and, as has been so well said by his successor, a multi tude of mourners which included many who had never seen his face. I feel especially happy because it seems to me that my pres ence here is an augury of that day, which may be distant, but which I believe will surely come, when the character and services of every eminent man of the British race in every land, under whatever distant skies he may have been born, shall be the common possession and the common inheritance and the common pride of every branch which is sprung from our ancestral stem. As I look round upon this assembly, I feel that I may almost be pardoned if I apply again the well- known line, 60 STANLEY. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. The quality and the character of this meet ing are in themselves a monument and a eulogy. It would be out of place for me to attempt any characterization of Dean Stan ley in the presence of those so much more fitted than myself for the task ; but I may be allowed to say a few words from the point of view of a stranger. I remember, on the day of the Dean s funeral, what struck me as most remarkable was seeing all ranks and conditions of men equalized, all differences of creed obliterated, all animosities of sect and party appeased by the touch of that common sympathy in sorrow. The news papers, as was natural and proper, remarked upon the number of distinguished persons who were present. To me, it seemed vastly more touching to look upon the number of humble and undistinguished persons, who felt that their daily lives had lost a consola tion and their hearts a neighbor and a friend. If I were to put in one word what struck me as perhaps the leading characteristic of Dean Stanley, and what made him so dear to many, I should say it was not his charity, though his charity was large, for charity has in it sometimes, perhaps often, a savor STANLEY. 61 of superiority, it was not his toleration, for toleration, I think, is apt to make a con cession of what should be simply recognized as a natural right, but it was rather, as it seems to me, the wonderful many-sidedness of his sympathies. I remember my friend Dr. Holmes, whose name I am sure is known, and if known is dear to most of you, called my attention to an epitaph in the neighborhood of Boston, in New England. It recorded the name and date of the death of a wife and mother, and then added sim ply, " She was so pleasant." That always struck me in Dean Stanley. I think no man ever lived who was so pleasant to so many people. We visited him as we visit a clearer sky and a warmer climate. In think ing of this meeting this morning, I was reminded of a proverbial phrase which we have in America, and which, I believe, we carried from England : we apologize for the shortcomings and faults of our fellow-beings by saying, " There is a great deal of human nature in man." I think the one leading characteristic of Dean Stanley and I say it to his praise was the amount of human nature there was in him. So sweet, so gra cious, so cheerful, so illuminating was it that 62 STANLEY. there could not have been too much of it. It brought him nearer to all mankind, it recognized and called out the humanity that was in other men. His sympathies were so wide that they could not be confined by the boundaries of the land in which he was born: they crossed the channel and they crossed the ocean. No man was a foreigner to him, far less any American. And, in supporting the resolution, I should be in clined to make only one amendment : it would be to propose that the memorial, in stead of being national, should be interna tional. Since I came into the room, I have heard from Sir Rutherford Alcock that he has received from Boston, through the hands of Rev. Phillips Brooks, a friend of Dean Stanley, a contribution of ,206 toward the Stanley Hall. I am sure I am not pledging my countrymen to too much when I say that they will delight to share in this tribute to the late Dean. And England has lately given them, in so many ways, such touching and cordial reasons for believing that they cannot enter as strangers to any sorrow of hers, that I am sure you will receive most substantial and most sympathetic help from your kindred people on the other side of the STANLEY. 63 Atlantic, with whom the bonds of sympathy have been lately drawn more close, and by nothing more strikingly than by the sympa thy expressed, sir, by your Royal Mother, in a way which touched every heart on the other side of the Atlantic, and has called forth repeated expressions of gratitude. It will give me great pleasure to do all I can to aid the enterprise which is started here to-day. FIELDING. ADDRESS ON UNVEILING THE BUST OF FIELDING, DE LIVERED AT SHIRE HALL, TAUNTON, SOMERSET SHIRE, ENGLAND, 4 SEPTEMBER, 1883. FIELDING. I SHOULD have preferred that this office I am to perform to-day had fallen to another. Especially does it seem fitting that an Eng lish author should take the first place in do ing honor to the most thoroughly English of writers; and yet there is something very pleasant to me in thinking that my presence here to-day bears witness to the union of our tongue and of our literary traditions. I seem to be not inappropriately verifying the prophecy of Samuel Daniel made nearly three centuries ago : And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores The gain of our best glory may be sent To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident May come refined with accents that are ours ? I wish that I could hope to repay some part, however small, of this obligation by any accents of mine. A whisper will ever and 68 FIELDING. anon make itself heard by the inward ear of literary men, asking the importunate ques tions, " Pray, do you not ascribe a rather disproportionate relative importance to the achievements of those of your own craft ? " and "Does not genius manifest itself in many other ways, and those of far more practical usefulness to mankind ? " No doubt an overestimate of ourselves and of our own doings is a very common human failing, as we are all ready to admit when we candidly consider our neighbors, and yet the world is led by a true instinct to agree with us in assigning to works of imagination a usefulness higher in kind than any other and in allowing to their authors a certain right of sanctuary in our affections, within whose limit the ordinary writs of human censure do not run ; for not only are the most vivid sensations of which our moral and intellectual nature is capable received through the imagination, but that mysterious faculty, in its loftiest and purest exercise, rescues us from our narrow personality, and lifts us up to regions of serener scope and more ideal satisfaction. It cheats us with a semblance of creative power that seems almost divine, and exhilarates us by a mo- FIELDING. 69 mentary enlargement of the boundaries of our conscious being, as if we had been brought into some nearer relationship with elemental forces. This magic, it is true, is wrought to the full only by the three or four great poets, and by them only in their finest and most emancipated moments. Well may we value this incomparable gift ; well may we delight to honor the men who were its depositaries and instruments. Homer and 2Eschylus, and Dante and Shakespeare, speak to us as to their contemporaries, with an authority accumulated by all the years between them and us, and with a voice whose very remoteness makes it seem more divinely clear. At the height which these men were sometimes capable of reaching, the processes of the mind seem to be intuitive. But sometimes we find our treasure in more earthen vessels ; sometimes this wonder working faculty is bestowed upon men whose natural and congenial element is the prose of cities and the conventionalized emo tion of that artificial life which we are pleased to call real. Here it is forced to combine itself as best it may with the un derstanding, and it attains its ends such lower ends as only are possible through 70 FIELDING. observation and slowly-hoarded experience. Even then, though it may have lost its high est, it has not lost all its charm nor all the potency of its sway ; for I am inclined to think that it is some form or other, some de gree or other, of this vivid a vis of imagina tion which breaks the fetters of men s self- consciousness for a while, and enables them to play with their faculties instead of toil ing with them gives them, in short, an in definably delightful something that we call originality, or, when it addresses itself to artistic creation, genius. A certain sacred- ness was once attributed to the builders of bridges and makers of roads, and we but follow a natural and praiseworthy impulse when we cherish the memory and record the worth of any man of original and especially of creative mind, since it is the office of such also to open the highway for our fancy and our thought, through the chiaroscuro of tan gled actualities in which we dwell, to com merce with fresh forms of nature and new varieties of man. It is the privilege of gen ius that to it life never grows commonplace as to the rest of us, and that it sees Falstaffs or Don Quixotes or Squire Westerns where we have never seen anything more than the FIELDING. 71 ordinary Toms and Dicks and Harries whom an inscrutable Providence has seen fit to send into an already overpopulated world. These genius takes by the hand and leads through a maze of imaginary adventures ; exposes to a cross-play of fictitious circumstances, to the friction of other personages as unreal as themselves, and we exclaim " Why, they are alive ; this is creation ! " Yes, genius has endowed them with a fulness of life, a completeness of being, such as even they themselves had never dreamed of, and they become truly citizens of the world forever. A great living poet, who has in his own work illustrated every form of imagination, has told us admirably what the secret of this illusory creativeness is, as no one has a bet ter right to know. I find first Writ down for very a b c of fact, In the beginning God made heaven and earth, From which, no matter in what lisp, I spell And speak you out a consequence that man Man, as befits the made, the inferior thing 1 , Purposed since made to grow, not make in turn ; Yet forced to try and make, else fail to grow, Formed to rise, reach at, if not grasp and gain The good beyond him ; which attempt is growth Repeats God s process in man s due degree, A harmony man s proportionate result ; Creates not, but resuscitates perhaps. 72 FIELDING. No less man, bounded, yearning 1 to be free, May so project his surplusage of soul, In search of body ; so add self to self, By owning 1 what lay ownerless before, So find, so fill full, so appropriate forms. . . . Though nothing 1 which had never life, Shall get life from him, be, not having been, Yet something dead may get to live again. Now the man whom we are met to com memorate to-day felt this necessity and per formed this feat, and his works are become a substantial part of that English litera ture which may be said not merely to exist, but to live. They have become so, among other reasons, because he had the courage to be absolutely sincere, if he had not always the tact to see where sincerity is out of place. We may discuss, we may estimate him, but we cannot push him from his place. His imagination was of that secondary order of which I have spoken, subdued to what it worked in ; and his creative power is not less in degree than that of more purely ideal artists, but was different in kind, or, if not, is made to seem so by the more vulgar sub stance in which it wrought. He was inferior also in having no touch of tragic power or passion, though he can be pathetic when he will. There is nowhere a scene more pa- FIELDING. 73 thetic than that of the supper Amelia pre pares for Booth, who never comes to share it, and it is pathos made of materials as homely as Wordsworth himself would have chosen. Certainly Fielding s genius was incapable of that ecstasy of conception through which the poetic imagination seems fused into a molten unity with its material, and produces figures that are typical without loss of characteris tic individuality, as if they were drawn, not from what we call real life, but from the very source of life itself, and were cast in that universal mould about which the subtlest thinkers that have ever lived so long busied themselves. Fielding s characters are very real persons ; but they are not types in the same sense as Lear and Hamlet. They seem to be men whom we have seen rather than men whom we might see if we were lucky enough men who have been rather than who might have been. He was especially a humorist ; and the weakness of the humorist is that he can never be quite unconscious, for in him it seems as if the two lobes of the brain were never in perfect unison, so that if ever one of them be on the point of sur rendering itself to a fine frenzy of unquali fied enthusiasm, the other watches it, makes 74 FIELDING. fun of it, renders it uneasy with a vague sense of absurd incongruity, till at last it is forced to laugh when it had rather cry. Heine turned this to his purpose, and this is what makes him so profoundly, and yet sometimes so unpleasantly, pathetic. Shake speare, as remarkable in this, perhaps, as in anything else, is the only man in whom the rarest poetic power has worked side by side at the same bench with humor, and has not been more or less disenchanted by it. I have lingered so long on general questions, not because I feared to meet more directly an objection which I am told has been made to this tribute of respect and affection for Field ing, but because I doubted whether it was necessary or wise to notice it at all ; and yet, though it must be admitted that his books cannot be recommended virginibus pueris- que, I will say frankly that it is not because they would corrupt, but because they would shock ; and surely this need not affect the fact that he was a great and original genius who has done honor to his country, which is what we chiefly have to consider here. A gallery of Somersetshire worthies from which he was absent would be as incomplete as a history of English literature that should not mention him. FIELDING. 75 Fielding needs no recognition from us ; his fame is established and admitted, and his character is gradually clearing itself of the stains with which malice or jealousy or care less hearsay had darkened it. It has become an established principle of criticism that in judging a man we must take into account the age in which he lived, and which was as truly a part of him as he of it. Fielding s genius has drawn forth the sympathetic com mendation of such widely different men as Gibbon, Scott, Coleridge, Thackeray, and Leslie Stephen, and of such a woman as George Eliot. I possess a copy of " Tom Jones," the margins of which are crowded with the admiring comments of Leigh Hunt, as pure-minded a man as ever lived, and a critic whose subtlety of discrimination and whose soundness of judgment, supported as it was on a broad base of truly liberal schol arship, have hardly yet won fitting apprecia tion. There can be no higher testimonials to character then these ; and lately Mr. Austin Dobson has done, perhaps, as true a service as one man of letters ever did to another by reducing what little is known of the life of Fielding from chaos to coherence by ridding it of fable, by correcting and coordinating T6 FIELDING. dates, by cross-examining tradition till it stamineringly confessed that it had no visible means of subsistence, and has thus enabled us to get some authentic glimpse of the man as he really was. He has rescued the body of Fielding from beneath the swinish hoofs which were trampling it as once they tram pled the Knight of La Mancha, whom Field ing so heartily admired. "We really know almost as little of Fielding s life as of Shake speare s, but what we do know on any valid evidence is, I think, on the whole, highly creditable to him. Thrown upon the town at twenty with no training that would fit him for a profession, with the principles and tastes of the class to which he belonged by birth, and with a nominal allowance from his father of 200 a year, which, as he hu morously said, " anybody might pay that would," it is possible that when he had money in his pocket he may have spent it in ways that he might blush to remember, and when his pocket was empty may have tried to replenish it by expedients that were not to his taste. But there is no proof of this ex cept what is purely inferential, and there is evidence of the same kind, but stronger, that he had habits of study and industry that are FIELDING. 77 not to be put on at will as one puts on his overcoat, and that are altogether inconsistent with the dissolute life he is supposed to have led. The dramatic pieces that he wrote dur ing his early period were, it is true, shame fully gross, though there are humorous hints in them that have been profitably worked up by later writers ; but what strikes me most in them is that there is so little real knowledge of life, the result of personal experience, and that the social scenery and conception of character are mainly borrowed from his im mediate predecessors, the dramatists of the Restoration. In grossness his plays could not outdo those of Dryden, whose bust has stood so long without protest in Westmin ster Abbey. As to any harm they can do there is little to be apprehended, for they are mostly as hard to read as a Shapira manuscript. I do not deny that Fielding s temperament was far from being over nice. I am willing to admit, if you will, that the woof of his nature was coarse and animal. I should not stop short of saying that it was sensual. Yet he liked and admired the highest and best things of his time the art of Hogarth, the acting of Garrick, the verse of Pope. He is said indeed to have 78 FIELDING. loved low company, but his nature was so companionable and his hunger for knowl edge so keen, that I fancy he would like any society that was not dull, and any conversa tion, however illiterate, from which he could learn anything to his purpose. It may be suspected that the polite conversation of the men of that day would differ little, except in grammar, from the talk of the pothouse. As I have said, we must guard against falling into the anachronism of forgetting the coarseness of the age into which he was born, and whose atmosphere he breathed. It was a generation whose sense of smell was undisturbed by odors that would now evoke a sanitary commission, and its moral nostrils were of an equally masculine temper. A coarse thread shows itself here and there, even through the satiny surface of the fas tidious Gray, and a taint of the century that gave him birth may be detected now and then in the " Doctor " of the pure and alto gether admirable Southey. But it is ob jected that there is an immoral tendency in " Joseph Andrews," " Tom Jones," and " Amelia." Certainly none of them is calculated to serve the cause of virtue, or at any rate, of FIELDING. 79 chastity, if measured by the standard of to day. But as certainly that standard looks a little awkward in the hands of people who read George Sand and allow an expurgated edition of the Decalogue for the use of them that go in chariots. I confess that in my impatience of such criticism I feel myself tempted, when Fielding s muse shows a too liberal ankle, to cry out with Tarn O Shanter, " Weel dune, cutty sark ! " His bluntness is more wholesome than the refinement of such critics, for the second of the Seven Deadly Sins is not less dangerous when she talks mysticism and ogles us through the gaps of a fan painted with the story of the Virgin Martyr. He did not go in search of impurity as if he relished the reek of it, like some French so-called realists for whose title- pages I should be inclined to borrow an in scription from the old tavern-signs, " Enter tainment for Man and Beast." He painted vice when it came in his way (and it was more obvious in his time) as a figure in the social landscape, and in doing so he was per haps a better moralist than those who ignore it altogether, or only when it lives in a gen teel quarter of the town. He at least does not paint the landscape as a mere background 80 FIELDING. for the naked nymph. He never made the blunder of supposing that the Devil always smelt of sulphur. He thought himself to be writing history, and called his novels Histo ries, as if to warn us that he should tell the whole truth without equivocation. He makes all the sins of his heroes react disastrously on their fortunes. He assuredly believed himself to be writing with an earnest moral purpose in his two greater and more delib erately composed works, and indeed clearly asserts as much. I also fully believe it, for the assertion is justified by all that we know of the prevailing qualities of his character, whatever may have been its failings and lapses, if failings and lapses they were. It does not seem to have occurred to the Eng lish clergyman who wrote the epitaph over his grave at Lisbon that there was any question about the matter, and he especially celebrates the moral purpose and effect of Fielding s works in Latin that would, per haps, have made the subject of it a little un comfortable. How, then, are we to explain certain scenes in these books, except by sup posing that Fielding was utterly unconscious that there was any harm in them? Perhaps we might also say that he was so sincere a FIELDING. 81 hater of cant and sham and hypocrisy that in his wrath against them he was not careful to consider the want of ceremonious decorum in his protest, and forgot that frankness might stop short of cynicism without losing any of its virtue. He had so hearty an Eng lish contempt for sentimentality that he did not always distinguish true sentiment from false, and setting perhaps an over-value on manliness, looked upon refinement as the ornament and protection of womanly weak ness rather than as what it quite as truly is the crown and complement of manly strength. He admired Richardson, and frankly expressed his admiration ; yet I think that over a bowl of punch he might have misnamed him the " Homer of Board ing-school Misses," just as Sainte-Beuve called Octave Feuillet the " Alfred de Mus- set of Boarding-schools." But besides all this, Fielding was a natu ralist, in the sense that he was an instinctive and careful observer. He loved truth, and, for an artist, seems to have too often missed the distinction between truth and exacti tude. He forgot the warning of Sir Walter Raleigh, perhaps more important to the artist than to the historian, that it is dan- 82 FIELDING. gerous to follow truth too near the heels. His aim was to paint life as he saw it, not as he wished it was or hoped it might be ; to show us what men really did, not what they were pleased to believe they thought it would be well for other men to do : and this he did with a force, a directness, and a vividness of coloring that make him in the truest sense a painter of history. No one can fail to admit the justice of the analogy between him and his friend Hogarth in this respect, pointed out by Mr. Dobson. In both cases we may regret that their model was too often no better than she should be. In the case both of Tom Jones and of Booth, it is to be noted, so far as the moral purpose is concerned, that their lapse from virtue al ways draws after them a retribution which threatens ruin to their dearest desires. I think it was Thackeray who said that Field ing had dared to paint a man an exploit for which no one would have the courage now. This is not the place or occasion for a critical estimate of Fielding, even could one add anything of value to what has been already said by competent persons. If there were a recognized standard in criti- FIELDING. 83 cism, as in apothecaries measure, so that by adding a grain of praise to this scale, or taking away a scruple of blame from that, we could make the balance manifestly even in the eyes of all men, it might be worth while to weigh Hannibal ; but when each of us stamps his own weights, and warrants the impartiality of his own scales, perhaps the experiment may be wisely foregone. Let it suffice here to state generally the reasons for which we set a high value on this man whose bust we unveil to-day. Since we are come together, not to judge, but only to commem orate, perhaps it would be enough to say, in justification of to-day s ceremony, that Field ing was a man of genius ; for it is hardly once in a century, if so often, that a whole country catches so rare and shy a specimen of the native fauna, and proportionably more seldom that a county is so lucky. But Fielding was something more even than this. It is not extravagant to say that he marks an epoch, and that we date from him the beginning of a consciously new form of lit erature. It was not without reason that Byron, expanding a hint given somewhere by Fielding himself, called him " the prose Homer of human nature." He had more 84 FIELDING. than that superficial knowledge of literature which no gentleman s head should be with out. He knew it as a craftsman knows the niceties and traditions of his craft. He saw that since the epic in verse ceased to be re cited in the market-places, it had become an anachronism ; that nothing but the charrn of narrative had saved Ariosto, as Tasso had been saved by his diction, and Milton by his style ; but that since Milton every epic had been born as dead as the Pharaohs more dead, if possible, than the " Columbiad " of Joel Barlow and the " Charlemagne " of Lucien Bonaparte are to us. He saw that the novel of actual life was to replace it, and he set himself deliberately (after having convinced himself experimentally in Parson Adams that he could create charac ter) to produce an epic on the lower and more neighborly level of prose. However opinions may differ as to the other merits of " Tom Jones," they are unanimous as to its harmony of design and masterliness of structure. Fielding, then, was not merely, in my judgment at least, an original writer, but an originator. He has the merit, what ever it may be, of inventing the realistic FIELDING. 85 novel, as it is called. I do not mean to say that there had been no stories professedly of real life before. The story of " Francioii " is such, and even more notably " Gil Bias," not to mention others. But before Fielding it seems to me that real life formed rather the scenic background than the substance, and that the characters are, after all, merely players who represent certain types rather than the living types themselves. Fielding, as a novelist, drew the motives that im pel his characters in all their actions from human nature, and not from artificial life. When I read " Gil Bias," I do not become part of the story I listen to an agreeable story-teller who narrates and describes, and I wait to hear what is going to happen ; but in Fielding I want to see what people are going to do and say, and I can half guess what will happen, because I know them and what they are and what they are likely to do. They are no longer images, but actual beings. Nothing can persuade me, for ex ample, that I do not know the sound of Squire Western s voice. Fielding did not and could not idealize, his object being exact truth, but he realized the actual truth around him as none had 86 FIELDING. done before and few have done since. As a creator of characters that are actuated by a motive power within themselves, and that are so livingly real as to become our famil iar acquaintances, he is among the greatest. Abraham Adams is excellent, and has had a numerous progeny, but I think that even he is inferior in originality, in coherence, and in the entire keeping of look, speech, motive, and action, to Squire Western, who is, in deed, one of the most simple and perfect creations of genius. If he has been less often copied than Parson Adams, may it not be because he is a more finished work of art, and, therefore, more difficult to copy ? I need not expatiate on the simple felicity and courteousness of his style, the unobtrusive clothing of a thought as clear as it is often profound, or on the good-nature of his satire, in which he reminds one of Chaucer, or on the subtle gravity of his irony, more delicate than that of Swift, and, therefore, perhaps even more deadly. I will only say that I think it less perfect, because more obviously intentional, in " Jonathan Wild " than in such masterpieces as the account of Cap tain BlifiTs death, and the epitaph upon his tomb. When it seems most casual and FIELDING. 87 inadvertent, it often cuts deepest, as when Squire Western, impatient of Parson Sup- pie s intervention, says to him, " Arn t in pulpit now ; when art a got up there then I never mind what dost say." I must not forget to say a word of his dialogue, which, except where he wishes to show off his at tainments in classical criticism, as in some chapters of "Amelia," is altogether so ad mirably spirited and characteristic that it makes us wonder at his failure as a dram atist. We may read Fielding s character clearly in his books, for it was not complex, but especially in his "Voyage to Lisbon," where he reveals it in artless inadvertence. He was a lovingly thoughtful husband, a tender father, a good brother, a useful and sagacious magistrate. He was courageous, gentle, thoroughly conscious of his own dig nity as a gentleman, and able to make that dignity respected. If we seek for a single characteristic which more than any other would sum him up, we should say that it was his absolute manliness, a manliness in its type English from top to toe. It is emi nently fitting, therefore, that the reproduc tion of his features, which I am about to unveil, should be from the hand of a woman. 88 FIELDING. Let me close with a quotation which was a favorite with Fielding : Verum ubi plura nitent, . . . non ego paucis Offendar maculis, quas aut incuria fudit, Aut humana parum cavit natura. COLERIDGE. ADDRESS ON UNVEILING THE BUST OF COLERIDGE, IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, 7 MAY, 1885. COLERIDGE. I SHOULD have preferred for many rea sons, on which I need not dwell, for they must be present to the minds of all who hear me, that the duty I have undertaken to per form here to-day had fallen to other hands. But the fact that this memorial of one who, if not a great poet and a great teacher, had in him the almost over-abundant materials of both, is the gift of one of my countrymen, the late Rev. Dr. Mercer, of Newport, Rhode Island, through his executrix, Mrs. Pell, seems to supply that argument of fitness that would otherwise have been absent. It does more, and for this I prize it the more ; it adds a fresh proof, if any were needed, that not all the waters of that ocean which divides but cannot divorce them can wash out of the consciousness of either nation the feeling that we hold our intellectual property in common, that we own allegiance to the 92 COLERIDGE. same moral and literary traditions, and that the fame of those who have shed lustre on our race, as it is an undivided inheritance, so it imposes an equal debt of gratitude, an equal responsibility, on the two great branches of it. Twice before I have had the honor of speaking within the precincts of this structure, the double sanctuary of religion and renown, surely the most venerable of ecclesiastical buildings to men of English blood. Once again I was a silent spectator while his body was laid here to mingle with consecrated earth who more deeply than any other in modern times had penetrated with the ferment of his thought the thinking of mankind, an event of deep significance as the proclamation of that truce between sci ence and religion which is, let us hope, the forerunner of their ultimate reconciliation. When I spoke here it was in commemora tion of personal friends, one of them the late Dean Stanley, dear to all who knew him ; the other an American poet, dear to all who speak the English tongue. It is to com memorate another friend that I come here to-day, for who so worthy of the name as one who was our companion and teacher in the happiest hours of our youth, made doubly COLERIDGE. 93 happy by the charm of his genius, and who to our old age brings back, if not the pres ence, at least the radiant image of the youth we have lost ? Surely there are no friends so constant as the poets, and among them, I think, none more faithful than Coleridge. I am glad to have a share in this repara tion of a long injustice, for as we looked about us hitherto in Poet s Corner we were tempted to ask, as Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti did of Dante, If these are here through lof tiness of genius, where is he? It is just fifty-one years ago that I became the pos sessor of an American reprint of Galignani s edition of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats in one volume. It was a pirated book, and I trust I may be pardoned for the delight I had in it. I take comfort from the thought that there must be many a Scottish minister and laird now in Heaven who liked their claret none the less that it had paid no tribute to the House of Hanover. I have heard this trinity of poets taxed with incongruity. As for me, I was grateful for such infinite riches in a little room, and never thought of looking a Pegasus in the mouth whose triple burden proved a stronger back than that even of the Templars traditional steed. 94 COLERIDGE. Much later, but still long ago, I read the " Friend," the " Biographia Literaria," and other prose works of Coleridge. In what may be given me to say I shall be obliged to trust chiefly to a memory which at my time of life is gradually becoming one of her own reminiscences, and is forced to com pound as best she may with her inexorable creditor Oblivion. But perhaps she will serve me all the better for the matter in hand, for what is proper here is at most a rapid generalization rather than a demon stration in detail of his claims to grateful remembrance. I shall naturally trust my self to judge him by his literary rather than by his metaphysical achievement. In the lat ter region I cannot help being reminded of the partiality he so often betrays for clouds, and see him, to use his own words, " making the shifting clouds seem what you please," or "a traveller go from mount to mount through cloudland, gorgeous land." Or sometimes I think of him as an alchemist in search of the philosopher s stone, and strip ping the lead, not only from his own roof, but from that of the parish church itself, to quench the fiery thirst of his alembic. He seems never to have given up the hope of COLERIDGE, 95 finding in the imagination some universal solvent, some magisterium majus, by which the lead of skepticism should be transmuted into the pure gold of faith, or, at least, per suaded to believe itself so. But we should not forget that many earnest and superior minds found his cloud castles solid habita tions, nor that alchemy was the nursing mother of chemistry. He certainly was a main influence in showing the English mind how it could emancipate itself from the vul garizing tyranny of common sense, and teach ing it to recognize in the imagination an im portant factor not only in the happiness but in the destiny of man. In criticism he was, indeed, a teacher and interpreter whose ser vice was incalculable. He owed much to Lessing, something to Schiller, and more to the younger Schlegel, but he owed most to his own sympathetic and penetrative im agination. This was the lifted torch (to borrow his own words again) that bade the starry walls of passages, dark before to the apprehension of even the most intelligent reader, sparkle with a lustre, latent in them to be sure, but not all their own. As John son said of Burke, he wound into his subject like a serpent. His analysis was elucidative 96 COLERIDGE. mainly, if you will, but could not have been so except in virtue of the processes of con structive and philosophical criticism that had gone on so long in his mind as to make its subtle apprehension seem an instinct. As he was the first to observe some of the sky s appearances and some of the shyer revela tions of outward nature, so he was also first in noting some of the more occult phenom- ( ena of thought and emotion. It is a criti cism of parts and passages, and was scat tered carelessly in obiter dicta, but it was not a bringing of the brick as a specimen of the whole house. It was comparative anat omy, far rather, which from a single bone re constructs the entire living organism. Many of his hints and suggestions are more preg nant than whole treatises, as where he says that the wit of Hudibras is the wit of thought. But what I think constitutes his great power, as it certainly is his greatest charm, is the perpetual presence of imagination, as constant a quality with him as fancy is with Calderon. She was his lifelong housemate, if not always hanging over his shoulders and whispering in his ear, yet within easy call, like the Abra of Prior COLERIDGE. 97 Abra was with him ere he spoke her name, And if he called another, Abra came. It was she who gave him that power of sym pathy which made his Wallenstein what I may call the most original translation in our language, unless some of the late Mr. Fitz gerald s be reckoned such. He was not ex act any more than Chapman. The molten material of his mind, too abundant for the capacity of the mould, overflowed it in gushes of fiery excess. But the main object of translation he accomplishes. Poetry is reproduced as poetry, and genius shows it self as genius, patent even in the march of the verse. As a poet, the impression he made upon his greater contemporaries will, I believe, be the ultimate verdict of criti cism. They all thought of him what Scott said of him, " No man has all the resources of poetry in such profusion. . . . His fancy and diction would long ago have placed him above all his contemporaries had they been under the direction of a sound judgment and a steady will." No doubt we have in Cole ridge the most striking example in literature of a great genius given in trust to a nerve less will and a fitful purpose. But I think the secret of his doing no more in poetry is 98 COLERIDGE. to be found in the fact that the judgment, so far from being absent, grew to be there in excess. His critical sense rose like a forbid ding apparition in the path of his poetic pro duction. I have heard of a military engineer who knew so well how a bridge should be built that he could never build one. It cer tainly was not wholly indolence that was to blame in Coleridge s case, for though he used to say early in life that he had no " finger industry," yet he left behind him a mass of correspondence, and his letters are generally long. But I do not care to discuss a ques tion the answer to which must be left mainly to conjecture or to the instinct of individual temperament. It is enough for us here that he has written some of the most poetical poetry in the language, and one poem, the " Ancient Mariner," not only unparalleled, but unapproached in its kind, and that kind of the rarest. It is marvellous in its mas tery over that delightfully fortuitous incon sequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland. Coleridge has taken the old ballad measure and given to it by an inde finable charm wholly his own all the sweet ness, all the melody and compass of a sym phony. And how picturesque it is in the COLERIDGE. 99 proper sense of the word. I know nothing like it. There is not a description in it. It is all picture. Descriptive poets generally confuse us with multiplicity of detail ; we cannot see their forest for the trees ; but Coleridge never errs in this way. With in stinctive tact he touches the right chord of association, and is satisfied, as we also are. I should find it hard to explain the singular charm of his diction, there is so much nicety of art and purpose in it, whether for music or meaning. Nor does it need any explana tion, for we all feel it. The words seem com mon words enough, but in the order of them, in the choice, variety, and position of the vowel -sounds they become magical. The most decrepit vocable in the language throws away its crutches to dance and sing at his piping. I cannot think it a personal pecul iarity, but a matter of universal experience, that more bits of Coleridge have imbedded themselves in my memory than of any other poet who delighted my youth unless I should except the sonnets of Shakespeare. This argues perfectness of expression. Let me cite an example or two : The sun s rim dips, the stars rush out, At one stride comes the dark ; 100 COLERIDGE. With far-heard whisper through the dark Off shot the spectre barque. Or take this as a bit of landscape : Beneath yon birch with silver bark And boughs so pendulous and fair, The brook falls scattered down the rock, And all is mossy there. It is a perfect little picture and seems so easily done. But try to do something like it. Coleridge s words have the unashamed nakedness of Scripture, of the Eden of dic tion ere the voluble serpent had entered it. This felicity of speech in Coleridge s best verse is the more remarkable because it was an acquisition. His earlier poems are apt to be turgid, in his prose there is too often a languor of prof usen ess, and there are pages where he seems to be talking to himself and not to us, as I have heard a guide do in the tortuous caverns of the Catacombs when he \ was doubtful if he had not lost his way. But when his genius runs freely and full in his prose, the style, as he said of Pascal, " is a garment of light." He knew all our best prose and knew the secret of its composition. When he is well inspired, as in his best po etry he commonly is, he gives us the very quintessence of perception, the clearly crys- COLERIDGE. 101 tallized precipitation of all that is most pre cious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from the memory. It is the pure visual ecstacy disengaged from the confused and confusing material that gave it birth. It seems the very beatitude of artless simpli city, and is the most finished product of art. I know nothing so perfect in its kind since Dante. The tiny landscape I have cited re minds me in its laconic adequacy of Li ruscelletti che de verdi colli Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno, Faccendo i lor canali e freddi e molli. I confess that I prefer the " Ancient Mar iner " to " Christabel," fine as that poem is in parts and tantalizing as it is in the sug gestion of deeper meanings than were ever there. The " Ancient Mariner " seems to have come of itself. In " Christabel " I fancy him saying, " Go to, let us write an imaginative poem." It never could be fin* ished on those terms. This is not the time nor the place to pass judgment on Coleridge the man. Doubtless it would have been happier for him had he been endowed with the business faculty that makes his friend Wordsworth so almost 102 COLERIDGE. irritatingly respectable. But would it have been happier for us ? We are here to-day not to consider what Coleridge owed to him self, to his family, or to the world, but what we owe to him. Let us at least not volun teer to draw his frailties from their dread abode. Our own are a far more profitable subject of contemplation. Let the man of imaginative temperament, who has never procrastinated, who has made all that was possible of his powers, cast the first stone. The cairn, I think, will not be as tall as Hector s. With Coleridge I believe the opium to have been congenital, and if we may judge by many a profoundly pathetic cry both in his poems and his letters, he answered grievously for his frailties during the last thirty years of his life. In an un published letter of his he says, speaking of another, but thinking certainly of himself, "An unfortunate man, enemy to himself only, and like all of that character expiat ing his faults by suffering beyond what the severest judge would have inflicted as their due punishment." There let us leave it, for nothing is more certain than that our per sonal weaknesses exact the uttermost far thing of penalty from us while we live. COLERIDGE. 103 Even in the dilapidation of his powers, due chiefly, if you will, to his own unthrifty man agement of them, we might, making proper deductions, apply to him what Mark Antony says of the dead Caesar He was the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of time. Whatever may have been his faults and weaknesses, he was the man of all his gener ation to whom we should most unhesitatingly allow the distinction of genius, that is, of one authentically possessed from time to time by some influence that made him better and greater than himself. If he lost himself too much in what Mr. Pater has admirably called " impassioned contemplation," he has at least left us such a legacy as only genius, and genius not always, can leave. It is for this that we pay him this homage of mem ory. He himself has said that It seems like stories from the land of spirits If any man obtain that which he merits, Or any merit that which he attains. Both conditions are fulfilled to-day. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF THE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN CHELSEA, MASSACHUSETTS, 22 DECEMBER, 1886. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. A FEW years ago my friend, Mr. Alex ander Ireland, published a very interesting volume which he called " The Book-Lover s Enchiridion," the handbook, that is to say, of those who love books. It was made up of extracts from the writings of a great variety of distinguished men, ancient and modern, in praise of books. It was a chorus of many voices in many tongues, a hymn of gratitude and praise, full of such piety and fervor as can be paralleled only in songs ded icated to the supreme Power, the supreme Wisdom and the supreme Love. Nay, there is a glow of enthusiasm and sincerity in it which is often painfully wanting in those other too commonly mechanical compositions. We feel at once that here it is out of the fulness of the heart, yes, and of the head, too, that the mouth speaketh. Here was none of that compulsory commonplace which 108 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. is wont to characterize those " testimonials of celebrated authors," by means of which publishers sometimes strive to linger out the passage of a hopeless book toward its requi- escat in oblivion. These utterances which Mr. Ireland has gathered lovingly together are stamped with that spontaneousness which is the mint-mark of all sterling speech. It is true that they are mostly, as is only nat ural, the utterances of literary men, and there is a well-founded proverbial distrust of herring that bear only the brand of the packer, and not that of the sworn inspector. But to this objection a cynic might answer with the question, " Are authors so prone, then, to praise the works of other people that we are to doubt them when they do it unasked?" Perhaps the wisest thing I could have done to-night would have been to put upon the stand some of the more weighty of this cloud of witnesses. But since your invitation implied that I should myself say something, I will endeavor to set before you a few of the commonplaces of the occasion, as they may be modified by passing through my own mind, or by having made themselves felt in my own experience. The greater part of Mr. Ireland s wit- BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 109 nesses testify to the comfort and consolation they owe to books, to the refuge they have found in them from sorrow or misfortune, to their friendship, never estranged and outliving all others. This testimony they volunteered. Had they been asked, they would have borne evidence as willingly to the higher and more general uses of books in their service to the commonwealth, as well as to the individual man. Consider, for example, how a single page of Burke may emancipate the young student of poli tics from narrow views and merely contem poraneous judgments. Our English ances tors, with that common-sense which is one of the most useful, though not one of the most engaging, properties of the race, made a rhyming proverb, which says that When land and goods are gone and spent, Then learning 1 is most excellent ; and this is true so far as it goes, though it goes perhaps hardly far enough. The law also calls only the earth and what is immov ably attached to it real property, but I am of opinion that those only are real possessions which abide with a man after he has been stripped of those others falsely so called, and which alone save him from seeming and 110 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. from being the miserable forked radish to which the bitter scorn of Lear degraded every child of Adam. The riches of scholar ship, the benignities of literature defy for tune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot be alien ated. But they may be shared, they may be distributed, and it is the object and office of a free public library to perform these beneficent functions. " Books," says Wordsworth, " are a real world," and he was thinking, doubtless, of such books as are not merely the triumphs of pure intellect, however supreme, but of those in which intellect infused with the sense of beauty aims rather to produce de light than conviction, or, if conviction, then through intuition rather than formal logic, and, leaving what Donne wisely calls Unconcerning things matters of fact to science and the understanding, seeks to give ideal expression to those abiding reali ties of the spiritual world for which the out ward and visible world serves at best but as the husk and symbol. Am I wrong in using the word realities ? wrong in insisting on the BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. HI distinction between the real and the actual ? in assuming for the ideal an existence as absolute and self subsistent as that which appeals to our senses, nay, so often cheats them, in the matter of fact ? How very small a part of the world we truly live in is represented by what speaks to us through the senses when compared with that vast realm of the mind which is peopled by memory and imagination, and with such shining inhabitants ! These walls, these faces, what are they in comparison with the countless images, the innumerable popula tion which every one of us can summon up to the tiny show-box of the brain, in mate rial breadth scarce a span, yet infinite as space and time? and in what, I pray, are those we gravely call historical characters, of which each new historian strains his neck to get a new and different view, in any sense more real than the personages of fic tion? Do not serious and earnest men dis cuss Hamlet as they would Cromwell or Lincoln ? Does Caesar, does Alaric, hold ex istence by any other or stronger tenure than the Christian of Bunyan or the Don Quixote of Cervantes or the Antigone of Sophocles ? Is not the history which is luminous because 112 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. of an indwelling and perennial truth to na ture, because of that light which never was on land or sea, really more true, in the high est sense, than many a weary chronicle with names and date and place in which " an Amurath to Amurath succeeds " ? Do we know as much of any authentic Danish prince as of Hamlet ? But to come back a little nearer to Chel sea and the occasion that has called us to gether. The founders of New England, if sometimes, when they found it needful, an impracticable, were always a practical people. Their first care, no doubt, was for an ade quate supply of powder, and they encouraged the manufacture of musket bullets by enact ing that they should pass as currency at a farthing each a coinage nearer to its nom inal value and not heavier than some with which we are familiar. Their second care was that " good learning should not perish from among us," and to this end they at once established the Grammar (Latin) School in Boston, and soon after the college at Cam bridge. The nucleus of this was, as you all know, the bequest in money by John Har vard. Hardly less important, however, was the legacy of his library, a collection of good BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 113 books, inconsiderable measured by the stand ard of to-day, but very considerable then as the possession of a private person. From that little acorn what an oak has sprung, and from its acorns again what a vocal for est, as old Howell would have called it, old Howell whom I love to cite, because his name gave their title to the " Essays of Elia," and is borne with slight variation by one of the most delightful of modern au thors. It was, in my judgment, those two foundations, more than anything else, which gave to New England character its bent, and to Boston that literary supremacy which, I am told, she is in danger of losing, but which she will not lose till she and all the world lose Holmes. The opening of a free public library, then, is a most important event in the history of any town. A college training is an excel lent thing ; but, after all, the better part of every man s education is that which he gives himself, and it is for this that a good library should furnish the opportunity and the means. I have sometimes thought that our public schools undertook to teach too much, and that the older system, which taught merely the three R s, and taught them well, leaving 114 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. natural selection to decide who should go farther, was the better. However this may be, all that is primarily needful in order to use a library is the ability to read. I say primarily, for there must also be the inclina tion, and, after that, some guidance in read ing well. Formerly the duty of a librarian was considered too much that of a watch-dog, to keep people as much as possible away from the books, and to hand these over to his successor as little worn by use as he could. Librarians now, it is pleasant to see, have a different notion of their trust, and are in the habit of preparing, for the direc tion of the inexperienced, lists of such books as they think best worth reading. Cata loguing has also, thanks in great measure to American librarians, become a science, and catalogues, ceasing to be labyrinths without a clew, are furnished with finger-posts at every turn. Subject catalogues again save the beginner a vast deal of time and trouble by supplying him for nothing with one at least of the results of thorough scholarship, the knowing where to look for what he wants. I do not mean by this that there is or can be any short cut to learning, but that there may be, and is, such a short cut to information BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 115 that will make learning more easily acces sible. But have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means ? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment ? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time ? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us ; it revives for us without a miracle the Age of Wonder, endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness, so that we walk invisible like fern-seed, and witness unharmed the plague at Athens or Florence or London ; accompany Caesar on his marches, or look in on Catiline in coun- fcil with his fellow conspirators, or Guy Fawkes in the cellar of St. Stephen s. We i often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult, for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs can be admitted for the 116 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. asking, a society, too, which will not involve them in ruinous expense and still more ruin ous waste of time and health and faculties ? Southey tells us that, in his walk one stormy day, he met an old woman, to whom, by way of greeting, he made the rather ob vious remark that it was dreadful weather. She answered, philosophically, that, in her opinion, " any weather was better than none ! " I should be half inclined to say that any reading was better than none, al laying the crudeness of the statement by the Yankee proverb, which tells us that, though " all deacons are good, there s odds in dea cons." Among books, certainly, there is much variety of company, ranging from the best to the worst, from Plato to Zola, and the first lesson in reading well is that which teaches us to distinguish between literature and merely printed matter. The choice lies wholly with ourselves. We have the key put into our hands ; shall we unlock the pantry or the oratory ? There is a Walla- chian legend which, like most of the fig ments of popular fancy, has a moral in it. One Bakala, a good-for-nothing kind of fel low in his way, having had the luck to offer a sacrifice especially well pleasing to God, BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 117 is taken up into heaven. He finds the Al mighty sitting in something like the best room of a Wallachian peasant s cottage there is always a profound pathos in the homeliness of the popular imagination, forced, like the princess in the fairy tale, to weave its semblance of gold tissue out of straw. On being asked what reward he de sires for the good service he has done, Ba- kala, who had always passionately longed to be the owner of a bagpipe, seeing a half worn-out one lying among some rubbish in a corner of the room, begs eagerly that it may be bestowed on him. The Lord, with a smile of pity at the meanness of his choice, grants him his boon, and Bakala goes back to earth delighted with his prize. With an infinite possibility within his reach, with the choice of wisdom, of power, of beauty at his tongue s end, he asked according to his kind, and his sordid wish is answered with a gift as sordid. Yes, there is a choice in books as in friends, and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society, is subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer s hand, to what it works in. Cato s advice, cum bonis am- bula, consort with the good, is quite as true if we extend it to books, for they, too, in- 118 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. sensibly give away their own nature to the mind that converses with them. They either beckon upwards or drag down. Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, says the World Spirit to Faust, and this is true of the as cending no less than of the descending scale. Every book we read may be made a round in the ever-lengthening ladder by which we climb to knowledge and to that temper ance and serenity of mind which, as it is the ripest fruit of Wisdom, is also the sweetest. But this can only be if we read such books as make us think, and read them in such a way as helps them to do so, that is, by en deavoring to judge them, and thus to make them an exercise rather than a relaxation of the mind. Desultory reading, except as conscious pastime, hebetates the brain and slackens the bow-string of Will. It commu nicates as little intelligence as the messages that run along the telegraph wire to the birds that perch on it. Few men learn the highest use of books. After lifelong study many a man discovers too late that to have had the philosopher s stone availed nothing without the philosopher to use it. Many a scholarly life, stretched like a talking wire to bring the wisdom of antiquity into commu- BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 119 nion with the present, can at last yield us no better news than the true accent of a Greek verse, or the translation of some filthy noth ing scrawled on the walls of a brothel by some Pompeian idler. And it is certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakespeare him self would, have been commonplace had he been paddocked in a thinly-shaven vocab ulary, and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley. A man is known, says the proverb, by the com pany he keeps, and not only so, but made by it. Milton makes his fallen angels grow small to enter the infernal council room, but the soul, which God meant to be the spa cious chamber where high thoughts and gen erous aspirations might commune together, shrinks and narrows itself to the measure of the meaner company that is wont to gather there, hatching conspiracies against our bet ter selves. We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterizes them. They were scholars be cause they did not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, but these were of the best. Their speech was noble, be- 120 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. cause they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato. We spend as much time over print as they did, but instead of communing with the choice thoughts of choice spirits, and unconsciously acquiring the grand man ner of that supreme society, we diligently in form ourselves, and cover the continent with a cobweb of telegraphs to inform ,us, of such inspiring facts as that a horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday, se riously damaging a valuable carryall; that a son of Mr. Brown swallowed a hickory nut on Thursday ; and that a gravel bank caved in and buried Mr. Robinson alive on Friday. Alas, it is we ourselves that are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthy impertinences ! It is we who, while we might each in his humble way be helping our fel lows into the right path, or adding one block to the climbing spire of a fine soul, are will ing to become mere sponges saturated from the stagnant goosepond of village gossip. This is the kind of news we compass the globe to catch, fresh from Bungtown Centre, when we might have it fresh from heaven by the electric lines of poet or prophet ! It is bad enough that we should be compelled to know so many nothings, but it is downright BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 121 intolerable that we must wash so many bar row-loads of gravel to find a grain of mica after all. And then to be told that the abil ity to read makes us all shareholders in the Bonanza Mine of Universal Intelligence ! One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading. My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the supreme books in what ever literature, or still better to choose some one great author, and make themselves thor oughly familiar with him. For, as all roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it, and you will find that, in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any vital piece of literature, you will be gradu ally and pleasantly persuaded to excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. For remem ber that there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attain ment. But the moment you have a definite aim, attention is quickened, the mother of memory, and all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intel- 122 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. ligent relation to a central object of constant and growing interest. This method also forces upon us the necessity of thinking, which is, after all, the highest result of all education. For what we want is not learn ing, but knowledge; that is, the power to make learning answer its true end as a quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual sympathies. I do not mean to say that every one is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite course of study, or indeed for serious study in any sense. I am quite willing that these should " browse in a library," as Dr. Johnson called it, to their hearts content. It is, perhaps, the only way in which time may be profitably wasted. But desultory reading will not make a " full man," as Bacon understood it, of one who has not Johnson s memory, his power of as similation, and, above all, his comprehensive view of the relations of things. "Read not," says Lord Bacon, in his Essay of Stud ies, " to contradict and confute ; nor to be lieve and take for granted ; nor to find talk and discourse ; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested ; that is, some books are to be read BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 123 only in parts ; others to be read, but not cu riously [carefully], and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy" This is weighty and well said, and I would call your attention especially to the wise words with which the passage closes. The best books are not always those which lend themselves to discussion and comment, but those (like Montaigne s Essays) which dis cuss and comment ourselves. I have been speaking of such books as should be chosen for profitable reading. A public library, of course, must be far wider in its scope. It should contain something for all tastes, as well as the material for a thorough grounding in all branches of knowl edge. It should be rich in books of refer ence, in encyclopaedias, where one may learn without cost of research what things are generally known. For it is far more useful to know these than to know those that are not generally known. Not to know them is the defect of those half-trained and there fore hasty men who find a mare s nest on every branch of the tree of knowledge. A library should contain ample stores of his- r, which, if it do not always deserve the 124 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. pompous title which Bolingbroke gave it, of philosophy teaching by example, certainly teaches many things profitable for us to know and lay to heart ; teaches, among other things, how much of the present is still held in mortmain by the past ; teaches that, if there be no controlling purpose, there is, at least, a sternly logical sequence in human affairs, and that chance has but a trifling dominion over them ; teaches why things are and must be so and not otherwise, and that, of all hopeless contests, the most hopeless is that which fools are most eager to challenge with the Nature of Things ; teaches, per haps, more than anything else, the value of personal character as a chief factor in what used to be called destiny, for that cause is strong which has not a multitude, but one strong man behind it. History is, indeed, mainly the biography of a few imperial men, and forces home upon us the useful lesson how infinitesimally important our own pri vate affairs are to the universe in general. History is clarified experience, and yet how little do men profit by it ; nay, how should we expect it of those who so seldom are taught anything by their own ! Delusions, especially economical delusions, seem the BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 125 only things that have any chance of an earthly immortality. I would have plenty of biography. It is no insignificant fact that eminent men have always loved their Plutarch, since example, whether for emu lation or avoidance, is never so poignant as when presented to us in a striking personal ity. Autobiographies are also instructive reading to the student of human nature, though generally written by men who are more interesting to themselves than to their fellow men. I have been told that Emerson and George Eliot agreed in thinking Rous seau s "Confessions" the most interesting book they had ever read. A public library should also have many and full shelves of political economy, for the dismal science, as Carlyle called it, if it prove nothing else, will go far towards prov ing that theory is the bird in the bush, though she sing more sweetly than the night ingale, and that the millennium will not hasten its coming in deference to the most convincing string of resolutions that were ever unanimously adopted in public meeting. It likewise induces in us a profound and wholesome distrust of social panaceas. I would have a public library abundant 126 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. in translations of the best books in all lan guages, for, though no work of genius can be adequately translated, because every word of it is permeated with what Milton calls " the precious life-blood of a master spirit " which cannot be transfused into the veins of the best translation, yet some acquaintance with foreign and ancient literatures has the liberalizing effect of foreign travel. He who travels by translation travels more has tily and superficially, but brings home some thing that is worth having, nevertheless. Translations properly used, by shortening the labor of acquisition, add as many years to our lives as they subtract from the pro cesses of our education. Looked at from any but the aesthetic point of view, transla tions retain whatever property was in their originals to enlarge, liberalize, and refine the mind. At the same time I would have also the originals of these translated books as a temptation to the study of languages, which has a special use and importance of its own in teaching us to understand the niceties of our mother tongue. The practice of transla tion, by making us deliberate in the choice of the best equivalent of the foreign word in our own language, has likewise the advan- BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 127 tage of continually schooling us in one of the main elements of a good style, pre cision ; and precision of thought is not only exemplified by precision of language, but is largely dependent on the habit of it. In such a library the sciences should be fully represented, that men may at least learn to know in what a marvellous museum they live, what a wonder-worker is giving them an exhibition daily for nothing. Nor let Art be forgotten in all its many forms, not as the antithesis of Science, but as her elder or fairer sister, whom we love all the more that her usefulness cannot be demon strated in dollars and cents. I should be thankful if every day-laborer among us could have his mind illumined, as those of Athens and of Florence had, with some image of what is best in architecture, painting, and sculpture, to train his crude perceptions and perhaps call out latent faculties. I should like to see the works of Ruskin within the reach of every artisan among us. For I hope some day that the delicacy of touch and accuracy of eye that have made our me chanics in some departments the best in the world, may give us the same supremacy in works of wider range and more purely ideal scope. 128 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. Voyages and travels I would also have, good store, especially the earlier, when the world was fresh and unhackneyed and men saw things invisible to the modern eye. They are fast sailing ships to waft away from present trouble to the Fortunate Isles. To wash down the drier morsels that every library must necessarily offer at its board, let there be plenty of imaginative literature, and let its range be not too narrow to stretch from Dante to the elder Dumas. The world of the imagination is not the world of abstraction and nonentity, as some con ceive, but a world formed out of chaos by a sense of the beauty that is in man and the earth on which he dwells. It is the realm of Might-be, our haven of refuge from the shortcomings and disillusions of life. It is, to quote Spenser, who knew it well The world s sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil. Do we believe, then, that God gave us in mockery this splendid faculty of sympathy with things that are a joy forever? For my part, I believe that the love and study of works of imagination is of practical utility in a country so profoundly material (or, as we like to call it, practical) in its leading BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 129 tendencies as ours. The hunger after purely intellectual delights, the content with ideal possessions, cannot but be good for us in maintaining a wholesome balance of the character and of the faculties. I for one shall never be persuaded that Shakespeare left a less useful legacy to his countrymen than Watt. We hold all the deepest, all the highest satisfactions of life as tenants of imagination. Nature will keep up the supply of what are called hard-headed peo ple without our help, and, if it come to that, there are other as good uses for heads as at the end of battering rams. I know that there are many excellent peo ple who object to the reading of novels as a waste of time, if not as otherwise harmful. But I think they are trying to outwit nature, who is sure to prove cunninger than they. Look at children. One boy shall want a chest of tools, and one a book, and of those who want books one shall ask for a botany, another for a romance. They will be sure to get what they want, and we are doing a grave wrong to their morals by driving them to do things on the sly, to steal that food which their constitution craves and which is wholesome for them, instead of having it 130 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. freely and frankly given them as the wisest possible diet. If we cannot make a silk purse out of a sow s ear, so neither can we hope to succeed with the opposite experiment. But we may spoil the silk for its legitimate uses. I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than Scott s novels, or Cooper s, to speak only of the dead. I have found them very good reading at least for one young man, for one middle-aged man, and for one who is growing old. No, no banish the Antiquary, banish Leather Stock ing, and banish all the world ! Let us not go about to make life duller than it is. But I must shut the doors of my imagi nary library or I shall never end. It is left for me to say a few words of cordial acknowl edgment to Mr. Fitz for his judicious and generous gift. I have great pleasure in be lieving that the custom of giving away money during their lifetime (and there is nothing harder for most men to part with, except prejudice) is more common with Americans than with any other people. It is a still greater pleasure to see that the favorite direction of their beneficence is towards the founding of colleges and libraries. My ob servation has led me to believe that there is BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 131 no country in which wealth is so sensible of its obligations as our own. And, as most of our rich men have risen from the ranks, may we not fairly attribute this sympathy with their kind to the benign influence of democ racy rightly understood? My dear and honored friend, George William Curtis, told me that he was sitting in front of the late Mr. Ezra Cornell in a convention, where one of the speakers made a Latin quotation. Mr. Cornell leaned forward and asked for a translation of it, which Mr. Curtis gave him. Mr. Cornell thanked him, and added, " If I can help it, no young man shall grow up in New York hereafter without the chance, at least, of knowing what a Latin quotation means when he hears it." This was the germ of Cornell University, and it found food for its roots in that sympathy and thoughtfulness for others of which I just spoke. This is the healthy side of that good nature which democracy tends to fos ter, and which is so often harmful when it has its root in indolence or indifference ; especially harmful where our public affairs are concerned, and where it is easiest, be cause there we are giving away what belongs to other people. It should be said, how- 132 BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. ever, that in this country it is as laudably easy to procure signatures to a subscription paper as it is shamefully so to obtain them for certificates of character and recommen dations to office. And is not this public spirit a national evolution from that frame of mind in which New England was colo nized, and which found expression in these grave words of Robinson and Brewster : " We are knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other s good, and of the whole." Let us never forget the deep and solemn import of these words. The problem before us is to make a whole of our many discordant parts, our many foreign elements, and I know of no way in which this can better be done than by providing a common system of education and a common door of access to the best books by which that education may be continued, broadened, and made fruitful. For it is certain that, whatever we do or leave undone, those discordant parts and foreign elements are to be, whether we will or no, members of that body which Robinson BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. 133 and Brewster had in mind, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, for good or ill. I am happy in believing that democracy has enough vigor of constitution to assimilate these seemingly indigestible morsels and transmute them into strength of muscle and symmetry of limb. There is no way in which a man can build so secure and lasting a monument for him self as in a public library. Upon that he may confidently allow " Resurgam " to be carved, for, through his good deed, he will rise again in the grateful remembrance and in the lifted and broadened minds and for tified characters of generation after genera tion. The pyramids may forget their build ers, but memorials such as this have longer memories. Mr. Fitz has done his part in providing your library with a dwelling. It will be for the citizens of Chelsea to provide it with worthy habitants. So shall they, too, have a share in the noble eulogy of the ancient wise man: "The teachers shall shine as the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever." WORDSWORTH. ADDRESS AS PRESIDENT OF THE WORDSWORTH SOCIETY, 10 MAY, 1884. WORDSWORTH. IN an early volume of the " Philosophical Transactions" there is a paper concerning " A certain kind of lead found in Germany proper for Essays." That it may have been first found in Germany I shall not question, but deposits of this depressing mineral have been discovered since in other countries also, and we are all of us more or less familiar with its presence in the essay, nowhere more than when this takes the shape of a critical dissertation on some favorite poet. Is this, then, what poets are good for, that we may darken them with our elucidations, or bury them out of sight under the gathering silt of our comments? Must we, then, peep and botanize on the rose of dawn or the passion flower of sunset ? I should rather take the counsel of a great poet, the commentaries on whom already make a library in themselves, and say, State content!, umana gente, al gut a, 138 WORDSWORTH. be satisfied if poetry be delightful, or help ful, or inspiring, or all these together, but do not consider too nicely why it is so. I would not have you suppose that I am glancing covertly at what others, from Cole ridge down, have written of Wordsworth. I have read them, including a recent very suggestive contribution of Mr. Swinburne, with no other sense of dissatisfaction than that which springs from " desiring this man s art and that man s scope." No, I am think ing only that whatever can be profitably or unprofitably said of him has been already said, and that what is said for the mere sake of saying it is not worth saying at all. More over, I myself have said of him what I thought good more than twenty years ago. 1 It is as wearisome to repeat one s self as it is profitless to repeat others, and that we have said something, however inadequate it may afterwards seem to us, is a great hin drance to saying anything better. The only function that a president of the Wordsworth Society is called on to perform is that of bidding it farewell at the end of his year, and it is perhaps fortunate that I have not had the leisure to prepare a dis- 1 Among my Books. WORDSWORTH. 139 course so deliberate as to be more worthy of the occasion. Without unbroken time there can be no consecutive thought, and it is my misfortune that in the midst of a reflection or of a sentence I am liable to be called away by the bell of private or public duty. Even had I been able to prepare something that might have satisfied me better, I should still be at the disadvantage of following next after a retiring president l who always has the art of saying what all of us would be glad to say if we could, and who in his ad dress last year gave us what seemed to me the finished model of what such a perform ance should be. During the year that has passed since our last Annual Meeting, however idle the rest of us may have been, our secretary has been fruitfully busy, and has given us two more volumes of what it is safe to say will be the standard and definitive edition of the poet s works. In this, the chronological arrange ment of the several poems, and still more, the record in the margin of the author s cor rections or repentances (pentimenti, as the Italians prettily call them), furnish us with a kind of self-registering instrument of the ex- 1 Mr. Matthew Arnold. 140 WORDS WORTH. actest kind by which to note, if not always the growth of his mind, yet certainly the gradual clarification of his taste, and the somewhat toilsome education of his ear. It is plain that with Wordsworth, more than with most poets, poetry was an art, an art, too, rather painfully acquired by one who was endowed by nature with more of the vis ion than of the faculty divine. Some of the more important omissions, especially, seem silently to indicate changes of opinion, though oftener, it may be suspected, of mood, or merely a shifting of the point of view, the natural consequence of a change for the better in his own material condition. One result of this marshalling of the poems by the natural sequence of date is the conviction that, whatever modifications Wordsworth s ideas concerning certain so cial and political questions may have un dergone, these modifications had not their origin in inconsiderate choice, or in any seduction of personal motive, but were the natural and unconscious outcome of en larged experience, and of more profound reflection upon it. I see no reason to think that he ever swerved from his early faith in the beneficence of freedom, but rather that WORDSWORTH. 141 he learned the necessity of defining more exactly in what freedom consisted, and the conditions, whether of time or place, under which alone it can be beneficent, of insisting that it must be an evolution and not a man ufacture, and that it should coordinate itself with the prior claims of society and civiliza tion. The process in his mind was the or dinary crystallization of sentiment hitherto swimming in vague solution, and now precip itated in principles. He had made the in evitable discovery that comes with years, of how much harder it is to do than to see what t were good to do, and grew content to build the poor man s cottage, since the means did not exist of building the prince s palace he had dreamed. It is noticeable how many of his earlier poems turn upon the sufferings of the poor from the injustice of man or the unnatural organization of society. He him self had been the victim of an abuse of the power that rank and wealth sometimes put into the hands of unworthy men, and had believed in political methods, both for rem edy and prevention. He had believed also in the possibility of a gregarious regener ation of man by sudden and sharp, if need were by revolutionary expedients, like those 142 WORDSWORTH. impromptu conversions of the inhabitants of a city from Christ to Mahomet, or back again, according to the creed of their con queror, of which we read in medieval ro mances. He had fancied that the laws of the universe would curtsy to the resolves of the National Convention. He had seen this hope utterly baffled and confuted, as it seemed, by events in France, by events that had occurred, too, in the logical sequence foretold by students of history. He had been convinced, perhaps against his will, that a great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions. Where was the remedy to be found, if remedy indeed there were ? It was to be sought at least only in an im provement wrought by those moral influ ences that build up and buttress the personal character. Goethe taught the self - culture that results in self-possession, in breadth and impartiality of view, and in equipoise of mind; Wordsworth inculcated that self -de velopment through intercourse with man and nature which leads to self-sufficingness, self- sustainment, and equilibrium of character. It was the individual that should and could be leavened, and through the individual the WORDS WORTH. 143 lump. To reverse the process was to break the continuity of history and to wrestle with the angel of destiny. And for one of the most powerfully effec tive of the influences for which he was seek ing, where should he look if not to Reli gion? The sublimities and amenities of outward nature might suffice for William Wordsworth, might for him have almost filled the place of a liberal education ; but they elevate, teach, and above all console the imaginative and solitary only, and suf fice to him who already suffices to himself. The thought of a god vaguely and vapor- ously dispersed throughout the visible crea tion, the conjecture of an animating princi ple that gives to the sunset its splendors, its passion to the storm, to cloud and wind their sympathy of form and movement, that sus tains the faith of the crag in its forlorn en durance, and of the harebell in the slender security of its stem, may inspire or soothe, console or fortify, the man whose physical and mental fibre is so sensitive that, like the spectroscope, it can both feel and record these impalpable impulses and impressions, these impersonal vibrations of identity be tween the fragmentary life that is in him- 144 WORDS WORTH. self and the larger life of the universe whereof he is a particle. Such supersensual emotions might help to make a poem, but they would not make a man, still more a so cial being. Absorption in the whole would not tend to that development of the individ ual which was the corner-stone of Words worth s edifice. That instinct in man which leads him to fashion a god in his own image, why may it not be an instinct as natural and wholesome as any other ? And it is not only God that this instinct embodies and personifies, but every profounder abstract conception, every less selfish devotion of which man is capa ble. Was it, think you, of a tiny crooked outline on the map, of so many square miles of earth, or of Hume and Smollett s History that Nelson was thinking when he dictated what are perhaps the most inspiring words ever uttered by an Englishman to English men ? Surely it was something in woman s shape that rose before him with all the po tent charm of noble impulsion that is hers as much through her weakness as her strength. And the features of that divine apparition, had they not been painted in every attitude of their changeful beauty by Romney ? WORDSWORTH. 145 Coarse and rudimentary as this instinct is in the savage, it is sublimed and etherealized in the profoundly spiritual imagination of Dante, which yet is forced to admit the le gitimacy of its operation. Beatrice tells him Thus to your minds it needful is to speak, Because through sense alone they understand : It is for this that Scripture condescends Unto your faculties and feet and hands, To God attributes, meaning something else. And in what I think to be the sublimest reach to which poetry has risen, the conclu sion of the " Paradiso," Dante tells us that within the three whirling rings of vari-col- ored light that symbolize the wisdom, the power, and the love of God, he seems to see the image of man. Wordsworth would appear to have been convinced that this Something deeply inter fused, this pervading but illusive intimation, of which he was dimly conscious, and that only by flashes, could never serve the ordi nary man, who was in no way and at no time conscious of it, as motive, as judge, and more than all as consoler, could never fill the place of the Good Shepherd. Observa tion convinced him that what are called the 146 WORDS WORTH. safeguards of society are the staff also of the individual members of it ; that tradition, habitude, and heredity are great forces, whether for impulse or restraint. He had pondered a pregnant phrase of the poet Daniel, where he calls religion " mother of Form and Fear." A growing conviction of its profound truth turned his mind towards the Church as the embodiment of the most potent of all traditions, and to her public offices as the expression of the most socially humanizing of all habitudes. It was no empty formalism that could have satisfied his conception, but rather that " Ideal Form, the universal mould," that forma mentis ceterna which has given shape and expres sion to the fears and hopes and aspirations of mankind. And what he understood by Fear is perhaps shadowed forth in the " Ode to Duty," in which he speaks to us out of an ampler ether than in any other of his poems, and which may safely "challenge insolent Greece and haughty Rome "for a compari son either in kind or degree. I ought not to detain you longer from the interesting papers, the reading of which has been promised for this meeting. No mem ber of this Society would admit that its ex- WORDSWORTH. 147 istence was needed to keep alive an interest in the poet, or to promote the study of his works. But I think we should all consent that there could be no better reason for its being than the fact that it elicits an utter ance of the impression made by his poetry on many different minds looking at him from as many different points of view. That he should have a special meaning for every one in an audience so various in temperament and character might well induce us to credit him with a wider range of sympathies and greater breadth of thought than each of us separately would, perhaps, be ready to admit. But though reluctant to occupy more than my fair share of your time, the occasion tempts me irresistibly to add a few more words of general criticism. It has seemed to me that Wordsworth has too commonly been estimated rather as philosopher or teacher than as poet. The value of what he said has had more influence with the jury than the way in which he said it. There are various methods of criticism, but I think we should all agree that literary work is to be judged from the purely literary point of view. If it be one of the baser consolations, it 148 WORDSWORTH. is also one of the most disheartening con comitants of long life, that we get used to everything. Two things, perhaps, retain their freshness more perdurably than the rest, the return of spring, and the more poignant utterances of the poets. And here, I think, Wordsworth holds his own with the best. But Mr. Arnold s volume of selections from him suggests a question of some interest, for the Wordsworth Society of special interest, How much of his poetry is likely to be a permanent posses sion? The answer to this question is in volved in the answer to a question of wider bearing, What are the conditions of per manence? Immediate or contemporaneous recognition is certainly not dominant among them, or Cowley would still be popular, Cowley, to whom the Muse gave every gift but one, the gift of the unexpected and in evitable word. Nor can mere originality assure the interest of posterity, else why are Chaucer and Gray familiar, while Donne, one of the subtlest and most self-irradiating minds that ever sought an outlet in verse, is known only to the few ? " Since Virgil there have been at most but four cosmopolitan authors, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, WORDS WORTH. 149 and Goethe. These have stood the supreme test of being translated into all tongues, be cause the large humanity of their theme, and of their handling of it, needed translation into none. Calderon is a greater poet than Goethe, but even in the most masterly trans lation he retains still a Spanish accent, and is accordingly interned (if I may Anglicize a French word) in that provincialism which we call nationality. When one reads what has been written about Wordsworth, one cannot fail to be struck by the predominance of the personal equation in the estimate of his value, and when we consider his claim to universal rec ognition, it would not be wise to overlook the rare quality of the minds that he has most attracted and influenced. If the char acter of the constituency may be taken as the measure of the representative, there can be no doubt that, by his privilege of inter esting the highest and purest order of intel lect, Wordsworth must be set apart from the other poets, his contemporaries, if not above them. And yet we must qualify this praise by the admission that he continues to be in sular ; that he makes no conquests beyond the boundaries of his mother-tongue ; that, 150 WORDSWORTH. more than perhaps any other poet of equal endowment, he is great and surprising in passages and ejaculations. In these he truly Is happy as a lover, and attired In sudden brightness, like a man inspired ; in these he loses himself, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, in an O, altitudo^ where his muse is indeed a muse of fire, that can ascend, if not to the highest heaven of in vention, yet to the supremest height of im personal utterance. Then, like Elias the prophet, " he stands up as fire, and his word burns like a lamp." But too often, when left to his own resources, and to the con scientious performance of the duty laid upon him to be a great poet quand meme, he seems diligently intent on producing fire by the primitive method of rubbing the dry sticks of his blank verse one against the other, while we stand in shivering expecta tion of the flame that never comes. In his truly inspired and inspiring passages it is remarkable also that he is most unlike his ordinary self, least in accordance with his own theories of the nature of poetic expres sion. When at his best, he startles and way lays as only genius can, but is furthest from WORDSWORTH. 151 that equanimity of conscious and constantly indwelling power that is the characteristic note of the greatest work. If Wordsworth be judged by the ex ungue leonem standard, by passages, or by a dozen single poems, no one capable of forming an opinion would hesitate to pronounce him, not only a great poet, but among the greatest, convinced in the one case by the style, and in both by the force that radiates from him, by the stimulus he sends kindling through every fibre of the intellect and of the imagination. At the same time there is no admittedly great poet in placing whom we are forced to acknowl edge so many limitations and to make so many concessions. Even as a teacher he is often too much of a pedagogue, and is apt to forget that poetry instructs not by precept and inculcation, but by hints and indirections and suggestions, by inducing a mood rather than by enforcing a principle or a moral. He sometimes im presses our fancy with the image of a school master whose class-room commands an un rivalled prospect of cloud and mountain, of all the pomp and prodigality of heaven and earth. From time to time he calls his pupils to the window, and makes them see what, 1 52 WORDS WOR Tff, without the finer intuition of his eyes, they had never seen ; makes them feel what, with out the sympathy of his more penetrating sentiment, they had never felt. It seems the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth, and to contain in itself its own justification. Then suddenly recollecting his duty, he shuts the window, calls them back to their tasks, and is equally well pleased and more discur sive in enforcing on them the truth that the moral of all this is that in order to be happy they must be virtuous. If the total absence of any sense of humor had the advantage sometimes of making Wordsworth sublimely unconscious, it quite as often made him so to his loss. In his noblest utterances man is absent except as the antithesis that gives a sharper emphasis to nature. The greatest poets, I think, have found man more interesting than nature, have considered nature as no more than the necessary scenery, artistically harm ful if too pompous or obtrusive, before which man acts his tragi-comedy of life. This pe culiarity of Wordsworth results naturally from the fact that he had no dramatic power, and of narrative power next to none. If he tell us a story, it is because it gives him the WORDS WORTH. 153 chance to tell us something else, and to him of more importance. In Scott s narrative poems the scenery is accessary and subor dinate. It is a picturesque background to his figures, a landscape through which the action rushes like a torrent, catching a hint of color perhaps from rock or tree, but never any image so distinct that it tempts us aside to reverie or meditation. With Wordsworth the personages are apt to be lost in the land scape, or kept waiting idly while the poet muses on its deeper suggestions. And he has no sense of proportion, no instinct of choice and discrimination. All his thoughts and emotions and sensations are of equal value in his eyes because they are his, and he gives us methodically and conscientiously all he can, and not that only which he can not help giving because it must and will be said. One might apply to him what Miss Skeggs said of Dr. Burdock, that " he sel dom leaves anything out, as he writes only for his own amusement." There is no limit to his let us call it fecundity. He was dimly conscious of this, and turned by a kind of instinct, I suspect, to the sonnet, be cause its form forced boundaries upon him, and put him under bonds to hold his peace 154 WORDSWORTH. at the end of the fourteenth line. Yet even here nature would out, and the oft recurring same subject continued lures the nun from her cell to the convent parlor, and tempts the student to make a pulpit of his pensive citadel. The hour-glass is there, to be sure, with its lapsing admonition, but it reminds the preacher only that it can be turned. I have said that Wordsworth was insular, but, more than this, there is also something local, I might say parochial, in his choice of subject and tone of thought. I am not sure that what is called philosophical poetry ever appeals to more than a very limited circle of minds, though to them it appeals with an intimate power that makes them fanatical in their preference. Perhaps none of those whom I have called universal poets (unless it be Dante) calls out this fanaticism, for they do not need it, fanaticism being a sure token either of weakness in numbers or of weakness in argument. The greatest poets interest the passions of men no less than their intelligence, and are more concerned with the secondary than the primal sym pathies, with the concrete than with the ab stract. But I have played the advocatus diaboli WORDS WORTH. 155 long enough. I come back to the main question from which I set out. Will Words worth survive, as Lucretius survives, through the splendor of certain sunbursts of imagi nation refusing for a passionate moment to be subdued by the unwilling material in which it is forced to work, while that mate rial takes fire in the working as it can and wdll only in the hands of genius, as it cannot and will not, for example, in the hands of Dr. Akenside ? Is he to be known a cen tury hence as the author of remarkable pas sages? Certainly a great part of him will perish, not, as Ben Jonson said of Donne, for want of understanding, but because too easily understood. His teaching, whatever it was, is part of the air we breathe, and has lost that charm of exclusion and privilege that kindled and kept alive the zeal of his acolytes while it was still sectarian, or even heretical. But he has that surest safeguard against oblivion, that imperishable incentive to curiosity and interest that belongs to all original minds. His finest utterances do not merely nestle in the ear by virtue of their music, but in the soul and life, by vir tue of their meaning. One would be slow to say that his general outfit as poet was so 156 WORDS WORTH. complete as that of Dryden, but that he habitually dwelt in a diviner air, and alone of modern poets renewed and justified the earlier faith that made poet and prophet interchangeable terms. Surely he was not an artist in the strictest sense of the word ; neither was Isaiah ; but he had a rarer gift, the capability of being greatly inspired. Pop ular, let us admit, he can never be ; but as in Catholic countries men go for a time into retreat from the importunate dissonances of life to collect their better selves again by communion with things that are heavenly, and therefore eternal, so this Chartreuse of Wordsworth, dedicated to the Genius of Sol itude, will allure to its imperturbable calm the finer natures and the more highly tem pered intellects of every generation, so long as man has any intuition of what is most sa cred in his own emotions and sympathies, or of whatever in outward nature is most capa ble of awakening them and making them operative, whether to console or strengthen. And over the entrance-gate to that purify ing seclusion shall be inscribed, Minds innocent and quiet take This for an hermitage. DON QUIXOTE. NOTES READ AT THE WORKINGMEN S COLLEGE, GREAT ORMOND STREET, LONDON. DON QUIXOTE. IN every literature which can be in any sense called national there is a flavor of the soil from which it sprang, in which it grew, and from which its roots drew nourishment. This flavor, at first, perhaps, the cause of distaste, gives a peculiar relish when we have once learned to like it. It is a limi tation, no doubt, and when artificially com municated, or in excess, incurs the reproach of provincialism, just as there are certain national dishes that are repugnant to every foreign palate. But it has the advantage of giving even to second-class writers in a foreign language that strangeness which in our own tongue is possible only to original ity either of thought or style. When this savor of nationality is combined with original genius, as in such a writer as Calderon for example, the charm is incalculably height ened. Spanish literature, if it have nothing that 160 DON QUIXOTE. for height and depth can be compared with the " Divina Commedia" of Dante (as in deed what other modern literature has ?), is rich in works that will repay study, and evolved itself by natural processes out of the native genius, the history, and the min gled races of the country more evidently, perhaps, than that of any other modern peo ple. It was of course more or less modified from time to time by foreign, especially by French, influences in its earlier period, by Italian in the sixteenth century, and in later times again by French and German influ ences more or less plainly marked, but through all and in spite of all, by virtue of the vigor of its native impulse, it has given an essentially Spanish character to all its productions. Its earliest monument, the " Song of the Cid," is in form a reproduction of the French " Chanson de Geste," a song of action or of what has been acted, but the spirit which animates it is very different from that which animates the " Song of Ro land," its nearest French parallel in subject and form. The Spanish Romances, very much misrepresented in the spirited and facile reproductions of Lockhart, are beyond question the most original and fascinating DON QUIXOTE. 161 popular poetry of which we know anything. Their influence upon the form of Heine s verse is unmistakable. In the Drama, also, Spain has been especially abundant and in ventive. She has supplied all Europe with plots, and has produced at least one drama tist who takes natural rank with the greatest in any language by his depth of imagination and fertility of resource. For fascination of style and profound suggestion, it would be hard to name another author superior to Calderon, if indeed equal to him. His charm was equally felt by two minds as unlike each other as those of Goethe and Shelley. These in themselves are sufficient achieve ments, and the intellectual life of a nation could maintain itself on the unearned incre ment of these without further addition to its resources. But Spain has also had the good fortune to produce one book which by the happiness of its conception, by the va riety of its invention, and the charm of its style, has been adopted into the literature of mankind, and has occupied a place in their affection to which few other books have been admitted. "We have no word in English so compre hensive as the Dlchtung of the Germans, 162 DON QUIXOTE. which includes every exercise of the creative faculty, whether in the line of pathos or hu mor, whether in the higher region of imagi nation or on the lower levels of fancy where the average man draws easier breath. It is about a work whose scene lies on this in ferior plane, but whose vividness of intui tion and breadth of treatment rank it among the highest achievements of imaginative lit erature, that I shall say a few words this evening, and I trust that I shall see nothing in it that in the author s intention, at least, is not honestly to be found there ; certainly that I shall not pretend to see anything which others have professed to discover there, but to which nature has made me color blind. I ask your attention this evening not to an essay on " Don Quixote," still less to an essay on Cervantes, but rather to a few illus trative comments on his one immortal book (drawn almost wholly from notes written on its margin in repeated readings), which may tend to throw a stronger light on what I shall not scruple to call its incomparable originality both as a conception and a study of character. It is one of the few books that can lay undisputed claim to the distinc- DON QUIXOTE. 163 tion of being universal and cosmopolitan, equally at home in all languages and wel come to all kindreds and conditions of men ; a human book in the fullest sense of the word ; a kindly book, whether we take that adjective in its original meaning of natural, or in its present acceptation, which would seem to imply that at some time or other, not too precisely specified in history, to be kindly and to be natural had been equiva lent terms. I can think of no book so thor oughly good-natured and good-humored, and this is the more remarkable because it shows that the optimism of its author had survived more misfortune and disenchantment than have fallen to the lot of many men, even the least successful. I suspect that Cervantes, with his varied experience, maimed at the battle of Lepanto, a captive in Algiers, pinched with poverty all his life, and writing his great book in a debtor s prison, might have formed as just an estimate of the van ity of vanities as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes. But the notion of Welt- schmerz, or the misery of living and acting in this beautiful world, seems never to have occurred to him, or, if it did, never to have embittered him. Had anybody suggested 164 DON Q.U1XOTE. the thought to him, he would probably have answered, " Well, perhaps it is not the best of all possible worlds, but it is the best we have, or are likely to get in my time. Had I been present at its creation, I might, per haps, as Alfonso the learned thought he might, have given some useful advice for its improvement, and, were I consulted even now, could suggest some amendments in my own condition therein. But after all, it is not a bad world, as worlds go, and the wisest plan, if the luck go against us, is to follow the advice of Durandarte in the Cave of Montesinos, Patience, and shuffle the cards. His sense of humor kept his nature sweet and fresh, and made him capable of seeing that there are two sides to every ques tion, even to a question in which his own personal interest was directly involved. In his dedication of the Second Part of " Don Quixote " to the Conde de Lemos, written in old age and infirmity, he smiles cheerfully on Poverty as on an old friend and life long companion. St. Francis could not have looked with more benignity on her whom he chose, as Dante tells us, for his bride. I have called " Don Quixote " a cosmo politan book, and I know of none other that DON QUIXOTE. 165 can compete with it in this respect unless it be "Robinson Crusoe." But "Don Quix ote," if less verisimilar as a narrative, and I am not sure that it is, appeals to far higher qualities of mind and demands a far subtler sense of appreciation than the mas terpiece of Defoe. If the latter represent in simplest prose what interests us because it might happen to any man, the other, while seeming never to leave the low level of fact and possibility, constantly suggests the loftier region of symbol, and sets before us that eternal contrast between the ideal and the real, between the world as it might be and the world as it is, between the fer vid completeness of conception and the chill inadequacy of fulfilment, which life sooner or later, directly or indirectly, forces upon the consciousness of every man who is more than a patent digester. There is a moral in "Don Quixote," and a very pro found one, whether Cervantes consciously put it there or not, and it is this : that who ever quarrels with the Nature of Things, wittingly or unwittingly, is certain to get the worst of it. The great difficulty lies in finding out what the Nature of Things really and perdurably is, and the great wisdom, 166 DON QUIXOTE. after we have made this discovery, or per suaded ourselves that we have made it. is in accommodating our lives and actions to it as best we may or can. And yet, though all this be true, there is another and deeper moral in the book than this. The pathos which underlies its seemingly farcical tur moil, 1 the tears which sometimes tremble un der our lids after its most poignant touches of humor, the sympathy with its hero which survives all his most ludicrous defeats and humiliations and is only deepened by them, the feeling that he is after all the one noble and heroic figure in a world incapable of comprehending him, and to whose inhabi tants he is distorted and caricatured by the crooked panes in those windows of custom and convention through which they see him, all this seems to hint that only he who has the imagination to conceive and the courage to attempt a trial of strength with what 1 I can think of no better instance to show how thin is the partition that divides humor from pathos than the lustration of the two vulgar Laises (distraidas mozas) by the pure imagination of Don Quixote (Part. Prim, cap. ii.). The sentiment is more natural and truer than that which Victor Hugo puts into the mouth of Marion Delorme when she tells her lover that "his love has given her back her virginity." To him it might, but it would rather have reproached her with the loss of it. DON QUIXOTE. 167 foists itself on our senses as the Order of Nature for the time being can achieve great results or kindle the cooperative and efficient enthusiasm of his fellow -men. The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next. How exalted was Don Quixote s own conception of his mission is clear from what is said of his first sight of the inn (Part. Prim. cap. iii.), that " it was as if he had seen a star which guided him not to the por tals, but to the fortress of his redemption," where the allusion were too daring were he not persuaded that he is going forth to re deem the world. Cervantes, of course, is not so much speaking in his own person, as telling what passed in the mind of his hero. Am I forcing upon Cervantes a meaning alien to the purpose of his story and anach ronistic to the age in which he lived ? I do not think so, and if I err I do so in good company. I admit that there is a kind of what is called constructive criticism, which is sometimes pushed so far beyond its proper limits as to deserve rather the name of de structive, as sometimes, in the so-called res toration of an ancient building, the mate- 168 DON QUIXOTE. rials of the original architect are used in the erection of a new edifice of which he had never dreamed, or, if he had dreamed of it, would have fancied himself the victim of some horrible nightmare. I would not will ingly lay myself open to the imputation of applying this method to Cervantes, and at tribute to him a depth of intention which, could he be asked about it, would call up in his eyes the meditative smile that must habitually have flickered there. Spaniards have not been wanting who protested against what they consider to be the German fashion of interpreting their national author. Don Juan Valera, in particular, one of the best of contemporary Spanish men of letters, both as critic and novelist, has argued the negative side of the question with force and acumen in a discourse pronounced on his admission to the Spanish Academy. But I must confess that, while he interested, he did not convince me. I could quite under stand his impatience at what he considered the supersubtleties of interpretation to which our Teutonic cousins, who have taught uf so much, are certainly somewhat prone. We have felt it ourselves when the obvious meaning of Shakespeare has been rewritten DON QUIXOTE. 169 into Hegelese, by some Doctor of Philosophy desperate with the task of saying something when everything had been already said, and eager to apply his new theory of fog as an illuminating medium. But I no not think that transcendental criticism can be charged with indiscretion in the case of " Don Quix ote." After reading all that can be said against the justice of its deductions, or divi nations if you choose to call them so, I am in clined to say, as Turner did to the lady who, after looking at one of his pictures, declared that she could not see all this in nature, "Madam, don t you wish to heaven you could ? " I believe that in all really great imaginative work we are aware, as in na ture, of something far more deeply inter fused with our consciousness, underlying the obvious and familiar, as the living spirit of them, and accessible only to a heightened sense and a more passionate sympathy. He reads most wisely who thinks everything into a book that it is capable of holding, and it is the stamp and token of a great book so to incorporate itself with our own being, so to quicken our insight and stimulate our thought, as to make us feel as if we helped to create it while we read. Whatever we 170 DON QUIXOTE. can find in a book that aids us in the con duct of life, or to a truer interpretation of it, or to a franker reconcilement with it, we may with a good conscience believe is not there by accident, but that the author meant that we should find it there. Cervantes cer tainly intended something of far wider scope than a mere parody on the Romances of Chivalry, which before his day had ceased to have any vitality as motives of human con duct, or even as pictures of a life that any body believed to have ever existed except in dreamland. That he did intend his book as a good-humored criticism on doctrinaire reformers who insist, in spite of all history and experience, on believing that society is a device of human wit or an imposture of hu man cunning, and not a growth, an evolu tion from natural causes, is clear enough in more than one passage to the thoughtful reader. It is also a satire on all attempts to remake the world by the means and methods of the past, and on the humanity of impulse which looks on each fact that rouses its pity or its sense of wrong as if it was or could be complete in itself, and were not in- dissolubly bound up with myriads of other facts both in the past and the present. When DON QUIXOTE. 171 we say that we are all of us the result of the entire past, we perhaps are not paying the past a very high compliment ; but it is no less true that whatever happens is in some sense, more or less strict, the result of all that has happened before. As with all men of heated imaginations, a near object of compassion occupies the whole mind of Don Quixote ; the figure of the present sufferer looms gigantic and shuts out all perception of remoter and more general considerations. Don Quixote s quarrel is with the struc ture of society, and it is only by degrees, through much mistake and consequent suf fering, that he finds out how strong that structure is ; nay, how strong it must be in order that the world may go smoothly and the course of events not be broken by a series of cataclysms. The French Revolu tionists with the sincerest good intentions set about reforming in Don Quixote s style, and France has been in commotion ever since. They carefully grubbed up every root that drew its sustenance from the past, and have been finding out ever since to their sorrow that nothing with roots can be made to order. " Do right though the heavens fall " is an admirable precept so long as the 172 DON QUIXOTE. heavens do not take you at your word and come down about your ears still worse about those of your neighbors. It is a rule rather of private than public obligation for indeed it is the doing of right that keeps the heavens from falling. After Don Quix ote s temporary rescue of the boy Andres from his master s beating, the manner in which he rides off and discharges his mind of consequences is especially characteristic of reform by theory without study of cir cumstances. It is a profound stroke of humor that the reformer Don Quixote should caution Sancho not to attempt making the world over again, and to adapt himself to circumstances. In one of his adventures, it is in perfect keeping that he should call on all the world to stop "till he was satisfied." It is to be noted that in both Don Quixote s attempts at the redress of particular wrong (Andre s and the galley-slaves) the objects (I might call them victims) of his benevolence come back again to his discomfiture. In the case of Andre s, Don Quixote can only blush, but Sancho (the practical man without theories) gives the poor fellow a hunch of bread and a few pennies, which are very much to the DON QUIXOTE. 173 purpose. Cervantes gives us a plain hint here that all our mistakes sooner or later surely come home to roost. It is remark able how independent of time and circum stance the satire of the great humorists always is. Aristophanes, Eabelais, Shake speare, Moliere, seem to furnish side-lights to what we read in our morning paper. As another instance of this in Cervantes, who is continually illustrating it, read the whole scene of the liberation of the galley-slaves. How perfectly does it fit those humanitarians who cannot see the crime because the person of the criminal comes between them and it ! That Cervantes knew perfectly well what he was about in his satire and saw beneath the surface of things is shown by the appari tion of the police and of the landlord with the bill in his hand, for it was these that brought the Good Old Times to their forlorn Hie Jacet. Coleridge, who in reach and range of in telligence, in penetration of insight, and in comprehensiveness of sympathy ranks among the first of critics, says, "Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard 174 DON QUIXOTE. the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him." W. S. Landor thought that Coleridge took the hint for this enlargement of the scope of the book from him, but if I remember rightly it was Bouterwek who first pointed criticism in the right direction. Down to his time u Don Quixote " had been regarded as a burlesque, a farcical satire on the Romances of Chivalry, just as Shy lock was so long considered a character of low comedy. But " Don Quixote," whatever its deeper meanings may be, has a literary importance almost without parallel, arid it is time that we should consider it briefly. It would be hard to find a book more purely original and without precedent. Cervantes himself says in the preface to the First Part that he knows not what book he is following in it. Indeed, he follows none, though we find traces of his having read the " Golden Ass " and Greek Romances. It was the first time that characters had been drawn from real life with such nicety and dis- DON QUIXOTE. 175 crimination of touch, with such minuteness in particulars, and yet with such careful elimination of whatever was unessential that the personages are idealized to a proper ar tistic distance from mere actuality. With all this, how perfectly life-like they are ! As Don Quixote tells us that he was almost ready to say he had seen Amadis, and pro ceeds to describe his personal appearance minutely, so we could affirm of the Knight of la Mancha and his Squire. They are real not because they are portraits, not because they are drawn from actual personages, but rather because of their very abstraction and generalization. They are not so much taken from life as informed with it. They are conceptions, not copies from any model ; cre ations as no other characters but those of Shakespeare are in so full and adequate a manner ; developed out of a seminal idea like the creatures of nature, not the matter- of-fact work of a detective s watchfulness, products of a quick eye and a faithful mem ory, but the true children of the imaginative faculty from which all the dregs of observa tion and memory have been distilled away, leaving only what is elementary and univer sal. I confess that in the productions of 176 DON QUIXOTE. what is called the realistic school I generally find myself in company that is little to my taste, dragged back into a world from which I am only too willing to escape, and set to grind in the prison house of the Philistines. I walk about in a nightmare, the supreme horror of whicli is that my coat is all but tonholes for bores to thrust their fingers through and bait me to their heart s con tent. Give me the writers who take me for a while out of myself and (with pardon be it spoken) away from my neighbors ! I do not ask that characters should be real ; I need but go into the street to find such in abun dance. I ask only that they should be pos sible, that they should be typical, because these I find in myself and with these can sympathize. Hector and Achilles, Clytem- nestra and Antigone, Roland and Oliver, Macbeth and Lear, move about, if not in worlds not realized, at least in worlds not realized to any eye but that of imagination, a world far from the police reports, a world into which it is a privilege, I might almost call it an achievement, to enter. Don Quix ote and his Squire are inhabitants of this world, in spite of the prosaic and often vul gar stage on which their tragi-comedy is DON QUIXOTE. 177 acted, because they are symbolical, because they represent the two great factors of hu man character and springs of human action the Imagination and the Understanding. If you would convince yourself how true this is, compare them with Sir Hudibras and Ralpho or still better with Roderick Ran dom and Strap. There can be no better proof that Cervantes meant to contrast the ideal with the matter of fact in the two characters than his setting side by side im ages of the same woman as reflected in the eyes of Sancho and his master ; in other words, of common sense and passion. 1 I shall not trouble you with any labored analysis of humor. If you wish to know what humor is I should say read " Don Quixote." It is the element in which the whole story lives and moves and has its being, and it wakens and flashes round the course of the narrative like a phosphorescent sea in the track of a ship. It is nowhere absent ; it is nowhere obtrusive ; it lightens and plays about the surface for a moment and is gone. It is everywhere by sugges tion, it is nowhere with emphasis and insist ence. There is infinite variety, yet always 1 Part. Prim. cap. x. xxxi. 178 DON QUIXOTE. in harmony with the characters and the purpose of the fable. The impression it produces is cumulative, not sudden or start ling. It is unobtrusive as the tone of good conversation. I am not speaking of the fun of the book, of which there is plenty, and sometimes boisterous enough, but of that deeper and more delicate quality, suggestive of remote analogies and essential incongru ities, which alone deserves the name of humor. This quality is so diffused in " Don Quix ote," so thoroughly permeates every pore and fibre of the book, that it is difficult to exemplify it by citation. Take as examples the scene with the goatherds, where Don Quixote, after having amply supped, dis courses so eloquently of that Golden Age which was happy in having nothing to eat but acorns or to drink but water ; where, while insisting that Sancho should assume equality as a man he denies it to him as San cho, by reminding him that it is granted by one who is his natural lord and master, there is such a difference, alas, between uni versal and particular Brotherhood! Take the debate of Don Quixote (already mad) as to what form of madness he should as- DON QUIXOTE. 179 sume ; the quarrel of the two madmen, Don Quixote and Cardenio, about the good fame of Queen Mad&sima, a purely imaginary being ; the resolution of Don Quixote, when forced to renounce knight-errantry, that he will become a shepherd of the kind known to poets, thus exchanging one unreality for another. Nay, take the whole book, if you would learn what humor is, whether in its most obvious or its most subtle manifesta tions. The highest and most complete illus tration is the principal character of the story. I do not believe that a character so abso lutely perfect in conception and delineation, so psychologically true, so full of whimsical inconsistencies, all combining to produce an impression of perfect coherence, is to be found in fiction. He was a monomaniac, 1 all of whose faculties, his very senses them selves, are subjected by one overmastering prepossession, and at last conspire with it, almost against their will, in spite of daily disillusion and of the uniform testimony of facts and events to the contrary. The key to Don Quixote s character is given in the first chapter where he is piecing out his im- 1 That Cervantes had made a study of madness is evi dent from the Introduction to the Second Part. 180 DON QUIXOTE, perfect helmet with a new visor. He makes one of pasteboard, and then, testing it with his sword, shatters it to pieces. He pro ceeds to make another strengthened with strips of iron, and " without caring to make a further trial of it, commissioned and held it for the finest possible visor." Don Quix ote always sees what he wishes to see ; in deed, always sees things as they are unless the necessities of his hallucination compel him to see them otherwise, and it is won derful with what ingenuity he makes every thing bend to those necessities. Cervantes calls him the sanest madman and the mad dest reasonable man in the world. Sancho says that he was fitter to be preacher than knight-errant. He makes facts courtesy to his prepossessions. At the same time, with exact truth to nature, he is never perfectly convinced himself except in moments of ex altation, and when the bee in his bonnet buzzes so loudly as to prevent his hearing the voice of reason. Cervantes takes care to tell us that he was never convinced that he was really a knight-errant till his cere monious reception at the castle of the Duke. Sancho, on the other hand, sees every thing in the dry light of common sense, ex- DON QUIXOTE. 181 cept when beguiled by cupidity or under the immediate spell of his master s imagination. Grant the imagination its premises, and its logic is irresistible. Don Quixote always takes these premises for granted, and Sancho, despite his natural shrewdness, is more than half tempted to admit them, or at any rate to run the risk of their being sound, on the chance of the reward which his master per petually dangled before him. This reward was that island of which Don Quixote con fesses he cannot tell the name because it is not down on any map. With delightful humor, it begins as some island, then be comes the island, and then one of those isl ands. And how much more probable does this vagueness render the fulfilment of the promise than if Don Quixote had locked himself up in a specific one 1 A line of re treat is thus always kept open, while Sancho s eagerness is held at bay by this seemingly chance suggestion of a choice in these hy pothetical lordships. This vague potentiality of islands eludes the thrust of any definite objection. And when Sancho is inclined to grumble his master consoles him by saying, " I have already told thee, Sancho, to give thyself no care about it ; for even should the 182 DON QUIXOTE. island fail us, there are the kingdoms of Di- namarca and Sobradisa that would fit you as the ring fits the finger, and since they are on terra firma, you should rejoice the more." All his terra firma was in dreamland. It should seem that Sancho was too shrewd for such a bait, and that here at least was an exception to that probability for which I have praised the story. But I think it rather a justification of it. We must re member how near the epoch of the story was to that of the Conquistador es, when men s fancies were still glowing with the splendid potentialities of adventure. And when Don Quixote suggests the possibility of creating Sancho a marquis, it is remarkable that he mentions the title conferred upon Cortes. The conscience of Don Quixote is in loyalty to his ideal ; he prizes desert as an inalienable possession of the soul. The con science of Sancho is in the eyes of his neigh bors, and he values repute for its worldly advantages. When Sancho tries to divert his master from the adventure of the Fulling Mills by arguing that it was night, and that none could see them, so that they might well turn out of the way to avoid the danger, and begs him rather to take a little sleep, DON QUIXOTE. 183 Don Quixote answers indignantly : " Sleep thou, who wast born for sleep. As for me, I shall do whatever I see to be most becoming to my profession." With equal truth to nature in both cases, Sancho is represented as inclined to believe the extravagant delu sions of his master because he has seen and known him all his life, while he obstinately refuses to believe that a barber s basin is the helmet of Mambrino because he sees and knows that it is a basin. Don Quixote says of him to the Duke, " He doubts every thing and believes everything." Cervantes was too great an artist to make him wholly vulgar and greedy and selfish, though he makes him all these. He is witty, wise ac cording to his lights, affectionate, and faith ful. When he takes leave of his imaginary governorship he is not without a certain manly dignity that is almost pathetic. The ingenuity of the story, the probabil ity of its adventures, the unwearied fecun dity of invention shown in devising and interlacing them, in giving variety to a sin gle theme and to a plot so perfectly simple in its conception, are all wonderful. The narrative flows on as if unconsciously, and our fancies float along with it. It is no- 184 DON QUIXOTE. ticeable, too, in passing, what a hypsethral story it is, how much of it passes in the open air, how the sun shines, the birds sing, the brooks dance, and the leaves murmur in it. This is peculiarly touching when we recollect that it was written in prison. In the First Part Cervantes made the mistake (as he himself afterwards practically ad mits) of introducing unprofitable digressions, and in respect to the propriety and congru- ousness of the adventures which befall Don Quixote I must also make one exception. I mean the practical jokes played upon him at the Duke s castle, in which his delusion is forced upon him instead of adapting circumstances to itself or itself to circum stances, according to the necessity of the occasion. These tend to degrade him in the eyes of the reader, who resents rather than enjoys them, and feels the essential vulgarity of his tormentors through all their fine clothes. It is quite otherwise with the cheats put upon Sancho, for we feel that either he will be shrewd enough to be more than even with the framers of them, or that he is of too coarse a fibre to feel them keenly. But Don Quixote is a gentleman and a monomaniac, qualities, the one of DON QUIXOTE. 185 which renders such rudeness incongruous, and the other unfeeling. He is, moreover, a guest. It is curious that Shakespeare makes the same mistake with Falstaff in the " Merry Wives of Windsor," and Fielding with Parson Adams, and in both cases to our discomfort. The late Mr. Edward Fitz gerald (yuis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tarn cari capitisf) preferred the Second Part to the First, and, but for these scenes, which always pain and anger me, I should agree with him. For it is plain that Cer vantes became slowly conscious as he went on how rich was the vein he had hit upon, how full of various and profound suggestion the two characters he had conceived and who together make a complete man. No doubt he at first proposed to himself a par ody of the Romances of Chivalry, but his genius soon broke away from the leading- strings of a plot that denied free scope to his deeper conception of life and men. Cervantes is the father of the modern novel, in so far as it has become a study and delineation of character instead of being a narrative seeking to interest by situation and incident. He has also more or less di rectly given impulse and direction to all hu- 186 DON QUIXOTE. moristic literature since his time. We see traces of him in Moliere, in Swift, and still more clearly in Sterne and Kichter. Field ing assimilated and Smollett copied him. Scott was his disciple in the " Antiquary," that most delightful of his delightful novels. Irving imitated him in his " Knickerbocker," and Dickens in his "Pickwick Papers." I do not mention this as detracting from their originality, but only as showing the wonder ful virility of his. The pedigrees of books are as interesting and instructive as those of men. It is also good for us to remember that this man whose life was outwardly a failure restored to Spain the universal em pire she had lost* HAEVARD ANNIVERSARY. ADDRESS DELIVERED IN SANDERS THEATRE, CAMBRIDGE, NOVEMBER 8, 1886, ON THE TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDA TION OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY. HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. IT seems an odd anomaly that, while re spect for age and deference to its opinions have diminished and are still sensibly di minishing among us, the relish of antiquity should be more pungent and the value set upon things merely because they are old should be greater in America than any where else. It is merely a sentimental rel ish, for ours is a new country in more senses than one, and, like children when they are .fancying themselves this or that, we have to play very hard in order to believe that we are old. But we like the game none the worse, and multiply our anniversaries with honest zeal, as if we increased our centuries by the number of events we could congratu late on having happened a hundred years ago. There is something of instinct in this, and it is a wholesome instinct if it serve to quicken our consciousness of the forces that are gathered by duration and continuity ; if 190 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. it teach us that, ride fast and far as we may, we carry the Past on our crupper, as im movably seated there as the black Care of the Roman poet. The generations of men are braided inextricably together, and the very trick of our gait may be countless gen erations older than we. I have sometimes wondered whether, as the faith of men in a future existence grew less confident, they might not be seeking some equivalent in the feeling of a retro spective duration, if not their own, at least that of their race. Yet even this continuance is trifling and ephemeral. If the tablets unearthed and deciphered by Geology have forced us to push back incalculably the birth day of man, they have in like proportion im poverished his recorded annals, making even the Platonic year but as a single grain of the sand in Time s hour-glass, and the inscrip tions of Egypt and Assyria modern as yes terday s newspaper. Fancy flutters over these vague wastes like a butterfly blown out to sea, and finds no foothold. It is true that, if we may put as much faith in heredity as seems reasonable to many of us, we are all in some transcendental sense the coevals of primitive man, and Pythagoras may well HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 191 have been present in Euphorbus at the siege of Troy. Had Shakespeare s thought taken this turn when he said to Time ? Thy pyramids built up with newer might To me are nothing novel, nothing strange ; They are but dressings of a former sight. But this imputed and vicarious longevity, though it may be obscurely operative in our lives and fortunes, is no valid offset for the shortness of our days, nor widens by a hair s breadth the horizon of our memories. Man and his monuments are of yesterday, and we, however we may play with our fancies, must content ourselves with being young. If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon. Mr. Ruskin said the other day that he could not live in a country that had neither castles nor cathedrals, and doubtless men of imaginative temper find not only charm but inspiration in structures which Nature has adopted as her foster-children, and on which Time has laid his hand only in benediction. It is not their antiquity, but its association with man, that endows them with such sen sitizing potency. Even the landscape some times bewitches us by this glamour of a human past, and the green pastures and 192 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. golden slopes of England are sweeter both to the outward and to the inward eye that the hand of man has immemorially cared for and caressed them. The nightingale sings with more prevailing passion in Greece that we first heard her from the thickets of a Euripidean chorus. For myself, I never felt the working of this spell so acutely as in those gray seclusions of the college quadrangles and cloisters at Oxford and Cambridge, conscious with venerable asso ciations, and whose very stones seemed hap pier for being there. The chapel pavement still whispered with the blessed feet of that long procession of saints and sages and scholars and poets, who are all gone into a world of light, but whose memories seem to consecrate the soul from all ignobler companionship. Are we to suppose that these memories were less dear and gracious to the Puritan scholars, at whose instigation this college was founded, than to that other Puritan who sang the dim religious light, the long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults, which these mem ories recalled? Doubtless all these things were present to their minds, but they were ready to forego them all for the sake of that HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 193 truth whereof, as Milton says of himself, they were members incorporate. The piti ful contrast which they must have felt between the carven sanctuaries of learning they had left behind and the wattled fold they were rearing here on the edge of the wilderness is to me more than tenderly it is almost sublimely pathetic. When I think of their unpliable strength of purpose, their fidelity to their ideal, their faith in God and in themselves, I am inclined to say with Donne that We are scarce our fathers shadows cast at noon. Our past is well-nigh desolate of aesthetic stimulus. We have none or next to none of these aids to the imagination, of these coigns of vantage for the tendrils of memory or affection. Not one of our older buildings is venerable, or will ever become so. Time refuses to console them. They all look as if they meant business, and nothing more. And it is precisely because this College meant business, business of the gravest im port, and did that business as thoroughly as it might with no means that were not nig gardly except an abundant purpose to do its best, it is precisely for this that we have gathered here to-day. We come back hither 194 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. from the experiences of a richer life, as the son who has prospered returns to the house hold of his youth, to find in its very homeli ness a pulse, if not of deeper, certainly of fonder, emotion than any splendor could stir. " Dear old Mother," we say, " how charming you are in your plain cap and the drab silk that has been turned again since we saw you ! You were constantly forced to remind us that you could not afford to give us this and that which some other boys had, but your discipline and diet were whole some, and you sent us forth into the world with the sound constitutions and healthy appetites that are bred of simple fare." It is good for us to commemorate this homespun past of ours ; good, in these days of a reckless and swaggering prosperity, to remind ourselves how poor our fathers were, and that we celebrate them because for themselves and their children they chose wisdom and understanding and the things that are of God rather than any other riches. This is our Founders Day, and we are come together to do honor to them all : first, to the Commonwealth which laid our corner-stone ; next, to the gentle and godly youth from whom we took our name, him- HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 195 self scarce more than a name, and with them to the countless throng of benefactors, rich and poor, who have built us up to what we are. We cannot do it better than in the familiar words : " Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us. The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the begin ning. Leaders of the people by their coun sels, and, by their knowledge of learning, meet for the people ; wise and eloquent in their instructions. There be of them that have left a name behind them that their praises might be reported. And some there be which have no memorial, who are per ished as though they had never been. But these were merciful men whose righteous ness hath not been forgotten. With their seed shall continually remain a good inherit ance. Their seed standeth fast, and their children for their sakes." This two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our College is not remarkable as com memorating any memorable length of days. There is hardly a country in Europe but can show us universities that were older than ours now is when ours was but a grammar- school, with Eaton as master. Bologna, 196 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. Paris, Oxford, were already famous schools when Dante visited them, as I love to think he did, six hundred years ago. We are an cient, it is true, on our own continent, an cient even as compared with several German universities more renowned than we. But it is not primarily the longevity of our Alma Mater upon which we are gathered here to congratulate her and each other. Kant says somewhere that, as the records of human transactions accumulate, the memory of man will have room only for those of supreme cosmopolitical importance. Can we claim for the birthday we are keeping a significance of so wide a bearing and so long a reach ? If we may not do that, we may at least af firm confidently that the event it records and emphasizes is second in real import to none that has happened in this western hemi sphere. The material growth of the colonies would have brought about their political separation from the Mother Country in the fulness of time, without that stain of blood which unhappily keeps its own memory green so long. But the founding of the first Eng lish college here was what saved New Eng land from becoming a mere geographical ex pression. It did more, for it insured, and I HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 197 believe was meant to insure, our intellectual independence of the Old World. That in dependence has been long in coming, but it will come at last ; and are not the names of the chiefest of those who have hastened its coming written on the roll of Harvard Col lege? I think this foundation of ours a quite unexampled thing. Surely never were the bases of such a structure as this has become, and was meant to be, laid by a community of men so poor, in circumstances so unpre cedented, and under what seemed such sul len and averted stars. The colony, still in significant, was in danger of an Indian war, was in the throes of that Antinomian con troversy which threatened its very existence, yet the leaders of opinion on both sides were united in the resolve that sound learn ing and an educated clergy should never cease from among them or their descendants in the commonwealth they were building up. In the inidst of such fears and such tu mults Harvard College was born, and not Marina herself had a more blusterous birth or a more chiding nativity. The prevision of those men must have been as clear as their faith was steadfast. Well they knew 198 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. and had laid to heart the wise man s pre cept, " Take fast hold of instruction ; let her not go ; for she is thy life." There can be little question that the ac tion of the General Court received its im pulse and direction from the clergy, men of eminent qualities and of well-deserved au thority. Among the Massachusetts Bay col onists the proportion of ministers, trained at Oxford and Cambridge, was surprisingly large, and, if we may trust the evidence of contemporary secular literature, such men as Higginson, Cotton, Wilson, Norton, Shep- hard, Bulkley, Davenport, to mention no more, were, in learning, intelligence, and general accomplishment, far above the aver age parson of the country and the church from which their consciences had driven them out. The presence and influence of such men were of inestimable consequence to the fortunes of the colony. If they were narrow, it was as the Sword of Righteous ness is narrow. If they had but one idea, it was as the leader of a forlorn hope has but one, and can have no other, namely, to do the duty that is laid on him, and ask no questions. Our Puritan ancestors have been misrepresented and maligned by persons HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 199 without imagination enough to make them selves contemporary with, and therefore able to understand, the men whose memories they strive to blacken. That happy breed of men who, both in church and state, led our first emigration, were children of the most splendid intellectual epoch that England has ever known. They were the coevals of a generation which passed on in scarcely diminished radiance the torch of life kin dled in great Eliza s golden days. Out of the New Learning, the new ferment alike religious and national, and the New Discov eries with their suggestion of boundless pos sibility, the alembic of that age had distilled a potent elixir either inspiring or intoxicat ing, as the mind that imbibed it was strong or weak. Are we to suppose that the lips of the founders of New England alone were unwetted by a drop of that stimulating draught ? that Milton was the only Puri tan that had read Shakespeare and Ben Jon- son and Beaumont and Fletcher ? I do not believe it, whoever may. Did they flee from persecution to bacoittb chemselves^\Tseiutors in turn ? This means only that they would not permit their holy enterprise to be hin dered or their property to be damaged even 200 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. by men with the most pious intentions and as sincere, if not always so wise, as they. They would not stand any nonsense, as the phrase is, a mood of mind from which their descendants seem somewhat to have degen erated. They were no more unreasonable than the landlady of Taylor the Platonist in refusing to let him sacrifice a bull to Jupiter in her back-parlor. The New England Puri tans of the second generation became nar row enough, and puppets of that formalism against which their fathers had revolted. But this was the inevitable result of that isolation which cut them off from the great currents of cosmopolitan thought and ac tion. Communities as well as men have a right to be judged by their best. We are justified in taking the elder Winthrop as a type of the leading emigrants, and the more we know him the more we learn to rever ence his great qualities, whether of mind or character. The posterity of those earnest and single-minded men may have thrown the creed of their fathers into the waste-basket, -.3^^]^^&^by Ifo iflvTid to .the duties they believed it to involve is the most precious and potent drop in their transmitted blood. It is especially noteworthy that they did not HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 201 make a strait-waistcoat of this creed for their new college. The more I meditate upon them, the more I am inclined to pardon the enthusiasm of our old preacher when he said that God had sifted three kingdoms to plant New England. 1 The Massachusetts Bay Colony itself also was then and since without a parallel. It was established by a commercial company, whose members combined in themselves the two by no means incongruous elements of religious enthusiasm and business sagacity, the earthy ingredient, as in dynamite, hold ing in check its explosive partner, which yet could and did explode on sufficient concus sion. They meant that their venture should be gainful, but at the same time believed that nothing could be long profitable for the body wherein the soul found not also her advantage. They feared God, and kept their powder dry because they feared Him 1 Writing 1 in the country, with almost no books about me, I have been obliged to trust wholly to my memory in my references. My friend Dr. Charles Deane, the most learned of our historical antiquarians, kindly in forms me that the passage alluded to in the text should read, "God sifted a whole Nation that he might send choice Grain out into this Wilderness." Stough ton s Election Sermon, preached in 1668. 202 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. and meant that others should. I think their most remarkable characteristic was their public spirit, and in nothing did they show both that and the wise forecast that gives it its best value more clearly than when they resolved to keep the higher education of youth in their own hands and under their own eye. This they provided for in the college. Eleven years later they established their system of public schools, where read ing and writing should be taught. This they did partly, no doubt, to provide feed ers for the more advanced schools, and so for the college, but even more, it may safely be inferred, because they had found that the polity to which their ends, rough-hew them as they might, must be shaped by the con ditions under which they were forced to act, could be safe only in the hands of intelli gent men, or, at worst, of men to whom they had given a chance to become such. In founding the College, they had three objects : first, the teaching of the Humanities and of Hebrew, as the hieratic language ; second, the training of a learned as well as godly clergy ; and third, the education of the Indians, that they might serve as mission aries of a higher civilization and of a purer HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 203 religion, as the necessary preliminary thereto. The third of these objects, after much effort and much tribulation, they were forced to abandon. John Winthrop, Jr., in a letter written to the Honorable Eobert Boyle in 1663, gives us an interesting glimpse of a pair of these dusky catechumens. " I make bold," he says, u to send heere inclosed a kind of rarity ; ... It is two papers of Latin com posed by two Indians now scollars in the Colledge in this country, and the writing is with their own hands. . . . Possibly as a novelty of that kind it may be acceptable, being a reall fruit of that hopefull worke y* is begu amongst them . . . testifying thus much that I received them of those Indians out of their own hands, and had ready an swers fro them in Latin to many questions that I propounded to them in y* language, and heard them both express severall sen tences in Greke also. I doubt not but those honorable fautores Scientiarum [the Royal Society] will gladly receive the intelligence of such Vestiqia Doctrines in this wilderness t/ amongst such a barbarous people." Alas, these Vestigia became only too soon retror- sum ! The Indians showed a far greater natural predisposition for disfurnishing the 204 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. outside of other people s heads than for fur nishing the insides of their own. Their own wild life must have been dear to them ; the forest beckoned just outside the College door, and the first blue-bird of spring whistled them back to the woods. They would have said to the president, with the Gypsy steward in the old play when he heard the new-come nightingale, " Oh, Sir, you hear I am called." At any rate, our College succeeded in keep ing but one of these wild creatures long enough to make a graduate of him, and he thereupon vanishes into the merciful shadow of the past. His name but, as there was only one Indian graduate, so there is only one living man who can pronounce his uncon verted name, and I leave the task to Dr. Hammond Trumbull. I shall not attempt, even in brief, a history of the College. It has already been excel lently done. A compendium of it would be mainly a list of unfamiliar names, and Cole ridge has said truly that such names "are non-conductors ; they stop all interest." The fame and usefulness of all institutions of learning depend on the greatness of those who teach in them, Queis arte benigna, Et meliore Into finxit praecordia Titan, HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 205 and great teachers are almost rarer than great poets. We can lay claim to none such (I must not speak of the living), unless it be Agassiz, whom we adopted, but we have had many devoted and some eminent. It has not been their fault if they have not pushed far ther forward the boundaries of knowledge. Our professors have been compelled by the necessities of the case (as we are apt to call things which we ought to reform, but do not) to do too much work not properly theirs, and that of a kind so exacting as to consume the energy that might have been ample for higher service. They have been obliged to double the parts of professor and tutor. During the seventeenth century we have reason to think that the College kept pretty well up to the standard of its contemporary colleges in England, so far as its poverty would allow. It seems to have enjoyed a certain fame abroad among men who sympathized with the theology it taught, for I possess a Hebrew Accidence, dedicated some two hundred years ago to the " illustrious academy at Boston in New England," by a Dutch scholar whom I cannot help thinking a very discerning per son. That the students of that day had access to a fairly good library may be inferred 206 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. from Cotton Mather s " Magnalia," though he knew not how to make the best use of it, and is a very nightmare of pedantry. That the College had made New England a good market for books is proved by John Dunton s journey hither in the interests of his trade. During the eighteenth and first quarter of the nineteenth centuries, I fancy the condi tion of things here to have been very much what it was in the smaller English colleges of the period, if we may trust the verses which Gray addressed to the goddess Ignorance. Young men who were willing mainly to teach themselves might get something to their ad vantage, while the rest were put here by their parents as into a comfortable quaran tine, where they could wait till the gates of life were opened to them, safe from any con tagion of learning, except such as might be developed from previous infection. I am speaking of a great while ago. Men are apt, I know, in after life to lay the blame of their scholastic shortcomings at the door of their teachers. They are often wrong in this, and I am quite aware that there are some pupils who are knowledge-proof ; but I gather from tradition, which I believe to be trustworthy, that there have been periods in the history HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 207 of the college when the students might have sung with Bishop Golias : Hi nos decent, sed indocti ; Hi nos decent, et nox nocti Indicat scientiam. Despite all this, it is remarkable that the two first American imaginative artists, All- ston in painting and Greenough in sculp ture, were graduates of Harvard. A later generation is justly proud of Story. We have a means of testing the general culture given here towards the middle of the last century in the Gratulatio presented by Harvard College on the accession of George III. It is not duller than such things usually are on the other side of the water, and it shows a pretty knack at tagging verses. It is noteworthy that the Greek in it, if I re member rightly, is wholly or chiefly Governor Bernard s. A few years earlier, some of the tracts in the Whitfield controversy prove that the writers had got here a thorough training in English at least. They had certainly not read their Swift in vain. But the chief service, as it was the chief office, of the College during all those years was to maintain and hand down the tradi tions of how excellent a thing Learning was, 208 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. even if the teaching were not always adequate by way of illustration. And yet, so far as that teaching went, it was wise in this, that it gave its pupils some tincture of letters as distinguished from mere scholarship. It aimed to teach them the authors, that is, the few great ones, the late Professor Popkin, whom the older of us remember, would have allowed that title only to the Greeks, and to teach them in such a way as to enable the pupil to assimilate somewhat of their thought, sentiment, and style, rather than to master the minuter niceties of the language in which they wrote. It struck for their matter, as Montaigne advised, who would have men taught to love Virtue instead of learning to decline virtus. It set more store by the marrow than by the bone that encased it. It made language, as it should be, a ladder to literature, and not literature a ladder to language. Many a boy has hated, and rightly hated, Homer and Horace the peda gogues and grammarians, who would have loved Homer and Horace the poets, had he been allowed to make their acquaintance. The old method of instruction had the prime merit of enabling its pupils to conceive that there is neither ancient nor modern on the HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 209 narrow shelves of what is truly literature. We owe a great debt to the Germans. No one is more indebted to them than I, but is there not danger of their misleading us in some directions into pedantry ? In his pref ace to an Old French poem of the thirteenth century, lately published, the editor informs us sorrowfully that he had the advantage of listening only two years and a half to the lectures of Professor Gaston Paris, in which time he got no farther than through the first three vowels. At this rate, to master the whole alphabet, consonants and all, would be a task fitter for the centurial adolescence of Methuselah than for our less liberal ration of years. I was glad my editor had had this advantage, and I am quite willing that Old French should get the benefit of such scrupu losity, but I think I see a tendency to train young men in the languages as if they were all to be editors, and not lovers of polite literature. Education, we are often told, is a drawing out of the faculties. May they not be drawn out too thin ? I am not under valuing philology or accuracy of scholarship. Both are excellent and admirable in their places. But philology is less beautiful to me than philosophy, as Milton understood the 210 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. word, and mere accuracy is to Truth as a plaster-cast to the marble statue ; it gives the facts, but not their meaning. If I must choose, I had rather a young man should be intimate with the genius of the Greek dramatic poets than with the metres of their choruses, though I should be glad to have him on easy terms with both. For more than two hundred years, in its discipline and courses of study, the College followed mainly the lines traced by its found ers. The influence of its first half century did more than any other, perhaps more than all others, to make New England what it is. During the one hundred and forty years preceding our War of Independence it had supplied the schools of the greater part of New England with teachers. What was even more important, it had sent to every parish in Massachusetts one man, the clergy man, with a certain amount of scholarship, a belief in culture, and generally pretty sure to bring with him or to gather a consider able collection of books, by no means wholly theological. Simple and godly men were they, the truest modern antitypes of Chau cer s Good Parson, receiving much, some times all, of their scanty salary in kind, and HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 211 eking it out by the drudgery of a cross- grained farm where the soil seems all back bone. If there was no regular practitioner, they practised without fee a grandmotherly sort of medicine, probably not much more harmful ( 0, dura messorum ilia) than the heroic treatment of the day. They con trived to save enough to send their sons through college, to portion their daughters, decently trained in English literature of the more serious kind, and perfect in the duties of household and dairy, and to make modest provision for the widow, if they should leave one. With all this, they gave their two sermons every Sunday of the year, and of a measure that would seem ruinously liberal to these less stalwart days, when scarce ten parsons together could lift the stones of Diomed which they hurled at Satan with the easy precision of lifelong practice. And if they turned their barrel of discourses at the end of the Horatian ninth year, which of their parishioners was the wiser for it ? Their one great holiday was Commencement, which they punctually attended. They shared the many toils and the rare festivals, the joys and the sorrows, of their townsmen as bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, 212 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. for all were of one blood and of one faith. They dwelt on the same brotherly level with them as men, yet set apart from and above them by their sacred office. Preaching the most terrible of doctrines, as most of them did, they were humane and cheerful men, and when they came down from the pulpit seemed to have been merely twisting their " cast-iron logic " of despair, as Coleridge said of Donne, " into true-love-knots." Men of authority, wise in council, independent, for their settlement was a life-tenure, they were living lessons of piety, industry, fru gality, temperance, and, with the magis trates, were a recognized aristocracy. Surely never was an aristocracy so simple, so harm less, so exemplary, and so fit to rule. I re member a few lingering survivors of them in my early boyhood, relics of a serious but not sullen past, of a community for which in civic virtue, intelligence, and general effi cacy I seek a parallel in vain : rusticorum mascula militum Proles . . . docta . . . Versare glebas et severse Matris ad arbitrium recisos Portare fustes. I know too well the deductions to be HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 213 made. It was a community without charm, or with a homely charm at best, and the life it led was visited by no muse even in dream. But it was the stuff out of which fortunate ancestors are made, and twenty-five years ago their sons showed in no diminished measure the qualities of the breed. In every household some brave boy was saying to his mother, as Iphigenia to hers, Tlaai yap p "EAA7j<n KOivbv ere/c cs ovxl <rol Nor were Harvard s sons the last. This hall commemorates them, but their story is writ ten in headstones all over the land they saved. To the teaching and example of those rev erend men whom Harvard bred and then planted in every hamlet as pioneers and out posts of her doctrine, Massachusetts owes the better part of her moral and intellectual inheritance. They, too, were the progeni tors of a numerous and valid race. My friend Dr. Holmes was, I believe, the first to point out how large a proportion of our men of light and leading sprang from their loins. The illustrious Chief Magistrate of the Republic, who honors us with his pres ence here to-day, has ancestors italicized in 214 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. our printed registers, and has shown himself worthy of his pedigree. During the present century, I believe that Harvard received and welcomed the new learning from Germany at the hands of Ev erett, Bancroft, and Ticknor, before it had been accepted by the more conservative uni versities of the Old Home. Everett s trans lation of Buttmann s Greek Grammar was reprinted in England, with the " Massachu setts " omitted after " Cambridge," at the end of the preface, to conceal its American origin. Emerson has told us how his intel lectual life was quickened by the eloquent enthusiasm of Everett s teaching. Mr. Ban croft made strenuous efforts to introduce a more wholesome discipline and maturer methods of study, with the result of a rebel lion of the Freshman Class, who issued a manifesto of their wrongs, written by the late Robert Rantoul, which ended thus : " Shall FREEMEN bear this? FRESHMEN are free men ! " They, too, remembered Revolution ary sires. Mr. Bancroft s translation of Heeren was the first of its kind, and it is worth mention that the earliest version from the prose of Henry Heine into English was made here, though not by a graduate of HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 215 Harvard. Ticknor also strove earnestly to enlarge the scope of the collegiate courses of study. The force of the new impulse did not last long, or produce, unless indirectly, lasting results. It was premature, the stu dents were really school-boys, and the col lege was not yet capable of the larger uni versity life. The conditions of American life, too, were such that young men looked upon scholarship neither as an end nor as a means, but simply as an accomplishment, like music or dancing, of which they were to acquire a little more or a little less, gener ally a little less, according to individual taste or circumstances. It has been mainly dur ing the last twenty-five years that the Col lege, having already the name, but by no means all the resources, of a university, has been trying to perform some, at least, of the functions which that title implies. Now half appears The tawny lion, pawing to get free Let us, then, no longer look backwards, but forwards, as our fathers did when they laid our humble foundations in the wilder ness. The motto first proposed for the Col lege arms was, as you know, Veritas, writ ten across three open books. It was a noble 210 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. one, and, if the full bearing of it was un derstood, as daring as it was noble. Per haps it was discarded because an open book seemed hardly the fittest symbol for what is so hard to find, and, if ever we fancy we have found it, so hard to decipher and to translate into our own language and life. Pilate s question still murmurs in the ear of every thoughtful, and Montaigne s in that of every honest man. The motto finally sub stituted for that, Christo et Ecclesice, is, when rightly interpreted, substantially the same, for it means that we are to devote our selves to the highest conception we have of Truth and to the preaching of it. Fortu nately, the Sphinx proposes her conundrums to us one at a time and at intervals propor tioned to our wits. Joseph de Maistre says that " un homme d esprit est tenu de savoir deux choses : 1, ce qu il est; 2, ou il est." The questions for us are, In what sense are we become a university? And then, if we become so, What and to what end should a university aim to teach now and here in this America of ours whose meaning no man can yet com prehend ? And, when we have settled what it is best to teach, comes the further ques- HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 217 tion, How are we to teach it? Whether with an eye to its effect on developing char acter or personal availability, that is to say, to its effect in the conduct of life, or on the chances of getting a livelihood ? Perhaps we shall find that we must have a care for both, and I cannot see why the two need be incompatible ; but if they are, I should choose the former term of the alternative. In a not remote past, society had still cer tain recognized, authoritative guides, and the college trained them as the fashion of the day required. But Damnosa quid non imminuit dies ? That ancient close corporation of official guides has been compelled to surrender its charter. We are pestered with as many volunteers as at Niagara, and, as there, if we follow any of them, may count on paying for it pretty dearly. The office of the higher instruction, nevertheless, continues to be as it always was, the training of such guides ; only it must now try to fit them out with as much more personal accomplishment and authority as may compensate the loss of hierarchical prestige. When President Walker, it must be now nearly thirty years ago, asked me in common 218 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. with my colleagues what my notion of a uni versity was, I answered, " A university is a place where nothing useful is taught ; but a university is possible only where a man may get his livelihood by digging Sanscrit roots." What I meant was that the highest office of the somewhat complex thing so named was to distribute the true Bread of Life, the pane degli angeli, as Dante called it, and to breed an appetite for it; but that it should also have the means and appliances for teaching everything, as the medieval universities aimed to do in their trivium and quadri- vium. I had in mind the ideal and the practical sides of the institution, and was thinking also whether such an institution was practicable, and, if so, whether it was desirable, in a country like this. I think it eminently desirable, and, if it be, what should be its chief function? I choose rather to hesitate my opinion than to assert it roundly. But some opinion I am bound to have, either my own or another man s, if I would be in the fashion, though I may not be wholly satisfied with the one or the other. Opin ions are " as handy," to borrow our Yankee proverb, " as a pocket in a shirt," and, I may add, as hard to come at. I hope, then, that HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 219 the day will come when a competent pro fessor may lecture here also for three years on the first three vowels of the Romance alphabet, and find fit audience, though few. I hope the day may never come when the weightier matters of a language, namely, such parts of its literature as have overcome death by reason of their wisdom and of the beauty in which it is incarnated, such parts as are universal by reason of their civilizing properties, their power to elevate and fortify the mind, I hope the day may never come when these are not predominant in the teach ing given here. Let the Humanities be maintained undiminished in their ancient right. Leave in their traditional pre-emi nence those arts that were rightly called lib eral ; those studies that kindle the imagina tion, and through it irradiate the reason ; those studies that manumitted the modern mind ; those in which the brains of finest temper have found alike their stimulus and their repose, taught by them that the power of intellect is heightened in proportion as it is made gracious by measure and symmetry. Give us science, too, but give first of all, and last of all, the science that ennobles life and makes it generous. I stand here as a man 220 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. of letters, and as a man of letters I must speak. But I am speaking with no exclusive intention. No one believes more firmly than I in the usefulness, I might well say the ne cessity, of variety in study, and of opening the freest scope possible to the prevailing bent of every mind when that bent shows itself to be so predominating as to warrant it. Many-sidedness of culture makes our vision clearer and keener in particulars. For after all, the noblest definition of Sci ence is that breadth and impartiality of view which liberates the mind from specialties, and enables it to organize whatever we learn, so that it become real Knowledge by being brought into true and helpful relation with the rest. By far the most important change that has been introduced into the theory and practice of our teaching here by the new position in which we find ourselves has been that of the elective or voluntary system of studies. We have justified ourselves by the familiar proverb that one man may lead a horse to water, but ten can t make him drink. Proverbs are excellent things, but we should not let even proverbs bully us. They are the wisdom of the understanding, not of the HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 221 higher reason. There is another animal, which even Simonides could compliment only on the spindle-side of his pedigree, and which ten men could not lead to water, much less make him drink when they got him thither. Are we not trying to force univer sity forms into college methods too narrow for them ? There is some danger that the elective system may be pushed too far and too fast. There are not a few who think that it has gone too far already. And they think so because we are in process of trans formation, still in the hobbledehoy period, not having ceased to be a college, nor yet having reached the full manhood of a uni versity, so that we speak with that ambigu ous voice, half bass, half treble, or mixed of both, which is proper to a certain stage of adolescence. We are trying to do two things with one tool, and that tool not specially adapted to either. Are our students old enough thoroughly to understand the import of the choice they are called on to make, and, if old enough, are they wise enough ? Shall their parents make the choice for them ? I am not sure that even parents are so wise as the unbroken experience and practice of mankind. We are comforted by 222 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. being told that in this we are only comply ing with what is called the Spirit of the Age, which may be, after all, only a finer name for the mischievous goblin known to our forefathers as Puck. I have seen sev eral Spirits of the Age in my time, of very different voices and summoning in very dif ferent directions, but unanimous in their propensity to land us in the mire at last. Would it not be safer to make sure first whether the Spirit of the Age, who would be a very insignificant fellow if we docked him of his capitals, be not a lying spirit, since such there are ? It is at least curious that, while the more advanced teaching has a strong drift in the voluntary direction, the compulsory system, as respects primary studies, is gaining ground. Is it indeed so self-evident a proposition as it seems to many that " You may "is as wholesome a lesson for youth as " You must " ? Is it so good a fore-schooling for Life, which will be a teacher of quite other mood, making us learn, rod in hand, precisely those lessons we should not have chosen ? I have, to be sure, heard the late President Quincy (cla- rum et venerabile nomen) say that if a young man came hither and did nothing more than HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 223 nib his shoulders against the college build ings for four years, he would imbibe some tincture of sound learning by an involuntary process of absorption. The founders of the College also believed in some impulsions to wards science communicated d tergo but of sharper virtue, and accordingly armed their president with that ductor dubitantmm which was wielded to such good purpose by the Reverend James Bowyer at Christ s Hospital in the days of Coleridge and Lamb. They believed with the old poet that whipping was "a wild benefit of na ture," and, could they have read Words worth s exquisite stanza, One impulse from a vernal wood Can teach us more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can, they would have struck out " vernal " and inserted " birchen " on the margin. I am not, of course, arguing in favor of a return to those vapulatory methods, but the birch, like many other things that have passed out of the region of the practical, may have another term of usefulness as a symbol after it has ceased to be a reality. One is sometimes tempted to think that 224 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. all learning is as repulsive to ingenuous youth as the multiplication table to Scott s little friend Marjorie Fleming, though this is due in great part to mechanical meth ods of teaching. " I am now going to tell you," she writes, " the horrible and wretched plaege that my multiplication table gives me ; you can t conceive it ; the most Devil ish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 ; it is what nature itself can t endure." I know that I am approaching treacherous ashes which cover burning coals, but I must on. Is not Greek, nay, even Latin, yet more un endurable than poor Marjorie s task? How many boys have not sympathized with Heine in hating the Romans because they invented Latin Grammar? And they were quite right, for we begin the study of languages at the wrong end, at the end which nature does not offer us, and are thoroughly tired of them before we arrive at them, if you will pardon the bull. But is that any reason for not studying them in the right way ? I am familiar with the arguments for making the study of Greek especially a matter of choice or chance. I admit their plausibility and the honesty of those who urge them. I should be willing also to admit that the HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 225 study of the ancient languages without the hope or the prospect of going on to what they contain would be useful only as a form of intellectual gymnastics. Even so they would be as serviceable as the higher mathe matics to most of us. But I think that a wise teacher should adapt his tasks to the highest, and not the lowest, capacities of the taught. For those lower also they would not be wholly without profit. When there is a tedious sermon, says George Herbert, God takes a text and teacheth patience, not the least pregnant of lessons. One of the arguments against the compulsory study of Greek, namely, that it is wiser to give our time to modern languages and modern history than to dead languages and ancient history, involves, I think, a verbal fallacy. Only those languages can properly be called dead in which nothing living has been writ ten. If the classic languages are dead, they yet speak to us, and with a clearer voice than that of any living tongue. Graiis ingenium, Gratis dedit ore rotundo Musa loqui, praeter laudem nullius avaris. If their language is dead, yet the litera ture it enshrines is rammed with life as per haps no other writing, except Shakespeare s, 226 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. ever was or will be. It is as contemporary with to-day as with the ears it first enrap tured, for it appeals not to the man. of then or now, but to the entire round of human nature itself. Men are ephemeral or evanes cent, but whatever page the authentic soul of man has touched with her immortaliz ing finger, no matter how long ago, is still young and fair as it was to the world s gray fathers. Oblivion looks in the face of the Grecian Muse only to forget her errand. Plato and Aristotle are not names but things. On a chart that should represent the firm earth and wavering oceans of the human mind, they would be marked as mountain- ranges, forever modifying the temperature, the currents, and the atmosphere of thought, astronomical stations whence the movements of the lamps of heaven might best be ob served and predicted. Even for the mas tering of our own tongue, there is no ex pedient so fruitful as translation out of an other ; how much more when that other is a language at once so precise and so flexi ble as the Greek ! Greek literature is also the most fruitful comment on our own. Coleridge has told us with what profit he was made to study Shakespeare and Milton HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 227 in conjunction with the Greek dramatists. It is no sentimental argument for this study that the most justly balanced, the most se rene, and the most fecundating minds since the revival of learning have been steeped in and saturated with Greek literature. We know not whither other studies will lead us, especially if dissociated from this ; we do know to what summits, far above our lower region of turmoil, this has led, and what the many-sided outlook thence, Will such studies make anachronisms of us, unfit us for the duties and the business of to-day ? I can recall no writer more truly modern than Montaigne, who was almost more at home in Athens and Rome than in Paris. Yet he was a thrifty manager of his estate and a most competent mayor of Bordeaux. I remember passing once in London where demolition for a new thoroughfare was going on. Many houses left standing in the rear of those cleared away bore signs with the inscription "Ancient Lights." This was the protest of their owners against being built out by the new improvements from such glimpse of heaven as their fathers had, with out adequate equivalent. I laid the moral to heart. 228 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. I am speaking of the College as it has always existed and still exists. In so far as it may be driven to put on the forms of the university, I do not mean the four Facul ties, merely, but in the modern sense, we shall naturally find ourselves compelled to assume the method with the function. Some day we shall offer here a chance, at least, to acquire the omne scibile. I shall be glad, as shall we all, when the young American need no longer go abroad for any part of his training, though that may not be always a disadvantage, if Shakespeare was right in thinking that Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits. I should be still gladder if Harvard should be the place that offered the alternative. It seems more than ever probable that this will happen, and happen in our day. And when ever it does happen, it will be due, more than to any and all others, to the able, energetic, single-minded, and yet fair-minded man who has presided over the College during the try ing period of transition, and who will by a rare combination of eminent qualities carry that transition forward to its accomplish ment without haste and without jar, ohne Hast, ohne Hast. He more than any of his HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 229 distinguished predecessors has brought the university into closer and more telling re lations with the national life in whatever that life has which is most distinctive and most hopeful. But we still mainly occupy the position of a German Gymnasium. Under existing cir cumstances, therefore, and with the methods of teaching they enforce, I think that special and advanced courses should be pushed on, so far as possible, as the other professional courses are, into the post-graduate period. The opportunity would be greater because the number would be less, and the teaching not only more thorough, but more vivifying through the more intimate relation of teacher and pupil. Under those conditions the vol untary system will not only be possible, but will come of itself, for every student will know what he wants and where he may get it, and learning will be loved, as it should be, for its own sake as well as for what it gives. The friends of university training can do nothing that would forward it more than the founding of post-graduate fellowships and the building and endowing of a hall where the holders of them might be commensals, remembering that when Cardinal Wolsey 230 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. built Christ Church at Oxford his first care was the kitchen. Nothing is so great a quickener of the faculties or so likely to prevent their being narrowed to a single groove as the frequent social commingling of men who are aiming at one goal by differ ent paths. If you would have really great scholars, and our life offers no prizes for such, it would be well if the university could offer them. I have often been struck with the inaiiy-sided versatility of the Fellows of English colleges who have kept their wits in training by continual fence one with another. During the first two centuries of her exist ence, it may be affirmed that Harvard did sufficiently well the only work she was called on to do, perhaps the only work it was pos sible for her to do. She gave to Boston her scholarly impress, to the Commonwealth her scholastic impulse. To the clergy of her training was mainly intrusted the oversight of the public schools ; these were, as I have said, though indirectly, feeders of the Col lege, for their teaching was of the plainest. But if a boy in any country village showed uncommon parts, the clergyman was sure to hear of it. He and the Squire and the HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 231 Doctor, if there was one, talked it over, and that boy was sure to be helped onward to college ; for next to the five points of Cal vinism our ancestors believed in a college education, that is, in the best education that was to be had. The system, if system it should be called, was a good one, a practical application of the doctrine of Natural Selec tion. Ah ! how the parents nay, the whole family moiled and pinched that their boy might have the chance denied to them ! Mr. Matthew Arnold has told us that in contemporary France, which seems doomed to try every theory of enlightenment by which the fingers may be burned or the house set on fire, the children of the public schools are taught in answer to the question, u Who gives you all these fine things ? " to say, "The State." Ill fares the State in which the parental image is replaced by an abstraction. The answer of the boy of whom I have been speaking would have been in a spirit better for the State and for the hope of his own future life : " I owe them, under God, to my own industry, to the sacrifices of my father and mother, and to the sympathy of good men." Nor was the boy s self-respect lessened, for the aid was given by loans, to 232 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. be repaid when possible. The times have changed, and it is no longer the ambition of a promising boy to go to college. They are taught to think that a common-school educa tion is good enough for all practical pur poses. And so perhaps it is, but not for all ideal purposes. Our public schools teach too little or too much : too little if education is to go no further, too many things if what is taught is to be taught thoroughly ; and the more they seem to teach, the less likely is education to go further, for it is one of the prime weaknesses of a democracy to be satis fied with the second-best if it appear to an swer the purpose tolerably well, and to be cheaper as it never is in the long run. Our ancestors believed in education, but not in making it wholly eleemosynary. And they were wise in this, for men do not value what they get for nothing any more than they value air and light till deprived of them. It is quite proper that the cost of our public schools should be paid by the rich, for it is their interest, as Lord Sher- brooke said, " to educate their rulers." But it is to make paupers of the pupils to furnish them, as is now proposed, with text-books, slates, and the like at public cost. This is HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 233 an advance towards that State Socialism which, if it ever prevail, will be deadly to certain homespun virtues far more precious than most of the book-knowledge in the world. It is to be hoped that our higher institutions of learning may again be brought to bear, as once they did, more directly on the lower, that they may again come into such closer and graduated relation with them as may make the higher education the goal to which all who show a clear aptitude shall aspire. I know that we cannot have ideal teachers in our public schools for the price we pay or in the numbers we require. But teaching, like water, can rise no higher than its source, and, like water again, it has a lazy aptitude for running down-hill unless a constant impulse be applied in the other direction. Would not this impulse be fur nished by the ambition to send on as many pupils as possible to the wider sphere of the university ? Would not this organic re lation to the Higher Education necessitate a corresponding rise in the grade of intelli gence, capacity, and culture demanded in the teachers ? Harvard has done much by raising its standard to force upwards that also of the 234 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. preparatory schools. The leaven thus in fused will, let us hope, filter gradually down wards till it raise a ferment in the lower grades as well. What we need more than anything else is to increase the number of our highly cultivated men and thoroughly trained minds ; for these, wherever they go, are sure to carry with them, consciously or not, the seeds of sounder thinking and of higher ideals. The only way in which our civilization can be maintained even at the level it has reached, the only way in which that level can be made more general and be raised higher, is by bringing the influence of the more cultivated to bear with greater energy and directness on the less cultivated, and by opening more inlets to those indirect influences which make for refinement of mind and body. Democracy must show its capacity for producing not a higher average man, but the highest possible types of man hood in all its manifold varieties, or it is a failure. No matter what it does for the body, if it do not in some sort satisfy that inextin guishable passion of the soul for something that lifts life away from prose, from the com mon and the vulgar, it is a failure. Unless it know how to make itself gracious and win- HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 235 ning, it is a failure. Has it done this ? Is it doing this ? Or trying to do it ? Not yet, I think, if one may judge by that commonplace of our newspapers that an American who stays long enough in Europe is sure to find his own country unendurable when he comes back. This is not true, if I may judge from some little experience, but it is interesting as implying a certain consciousness, which is of the most hopeful augury. But we must not be impatient ; it is a far cry from the dwellers in caves to even such civilization as we have achieved. I am conscious that life has been trying to civilize me for now nearly seventy years with what seem to me very inadequate results. We cannot afford to wait, but the Race can. And when I speak of civilization I mean those things that tend to develop the moral forces of Man, and not merely to quicken his aesthetic sensibility, though there is often a nearer relation between the two than is popularly believed. The tendency of a prosperous Democracy and hitherto we have had little to do but prosper is towards an overweening con fidence in itself and its home-made methods, an overestimate of material success, and a 236 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. corresponding indifference to the things of the mind. The popular ideal of success seems to be more than ever before the ac cumulation of riches. I say " seems," for it may be only because the opportunities are greater. I am not ignorant that wealth is the great fertilizer of civilization, and of the arts that beautify it. The very names of civilization and urbanity show that the re finement of manners which made the arts possible is the birth of cities where wealth earliest accumulated because it found itself secure. Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, it means leisure, it means liberty. But these, divorced from culture, that is, from intelligent purpose, become the very mockery of their own essence, not goods, but evils fatal to their possessor, and bring with them, like the Niblung hoard, a doom in stead of a blessing. A man rich only for himself has a life as barren and cheerless as that of the serpent set to guard a buried treasure. I am saddened when I see our suc cess as a nation measured by the number of acres under tillage or of bushels of wheat ex ported ; for the real value of a country must be weighed in scales more delicate than the HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 237 Balance of Trade. The garners of Sicily are empty now, but the bees from all climes still fetch honey from the tiny garden-plot of Theocritus. On a map of the world you may cover Judea with your thumb, Athens with a finger-tip, and neither of them figures in the Prices Current ; but they still lord it in the thought and action of every civilized man. Did not Dante cover with his hood all that was Italy six hundred years ago ? And, if we go back a century, where was Germany outside of Weimar ? Material success is good, but only as the necessary preliminary of better things. The measure of a nation s true success is the amount it has contributed to the thought, the moral en ergy, the intellectual happiness, the spiritual hope and consolation, of mankind. There is no other, let our candidates flatter us as they may. We still make a confusion be tween huge and great. I know that I am repeating truisms, but they are truisms that need to be repeated in season and out of sea son. The most precious property of Culture and of a college as its trustee is to maintain higher ideals of life and its purpose, to keep trimmed and burning the lamps of that 238 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. pharos, built by wiser than we, which warns from the reefs and shallows of popular doc trine. In proportion as there are more thor oughly cultivated persons in a community will the finer uses of prosperity be taught and the vulgar uses of it become disreputable. And it is such persons that we are commis sioned to send out with such consciousness of their fortunate vocation and such devo tion to it as we may. We are confronted with unexampled problems. First of all is democracy, and that under conditions in great part novel, with its hitherto imper fectly tabulated results, whether we consider its effect upon national character, on popular thought, or on the functions of law and gov ernment ; we have to deal with a time when the belief seems to be spreading that truth not only can but should be settled by a show of hands rather than by a count of heads, and that one man is as good as another for all purposes, as, indeed, he is till a real man is needed ; with a time when the press is more potent for good or for evil than ever any human agency was before, and yet is controlled more than ever before, by its in terests as a business rather than by its sense of duty as a teacher, and must purvey news HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 239 instead of intelligence ; with a time when divers and strange doctrines touching the greatest human interests are allowed to run about unmuzzled in greater number and va riety than ever before since the Reformation passed into its stage of putrefactive fermen tation ; with a time when the idols of the market-place are more devoutly worshipped than ever Diana of the Ephesians was ; when the guilds of the Middle Ages are re vived among us with the avowed purpose of renewing by the misuse of universal suffrage the class-legislation to escape which we left the Old World ; when the electric telegraph, by making public opinion simultaneous, is also making it liable to those delusions, pan ics, and gregarious impulses which trans form otherwise reasonable men into a mob ; and when, above all, the better mind of the country is said to be growing more and more alienated from the highest of all sciences and services, the government of it. I have drawn up a dreary catalogue, and the moral it points is this : That the College, in so far as it continues to be still a college, as in great part it does and must, is and should be limited by certain pre-existing conditions, and must consider first what the more gen- 240 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. eral objects of education are without neg lecting special aptitudes more than cannot be helped. That more general purpose is, I take it, to set free, to supple, and to train the faculties in such wise as shall make them most effective for whatever task life may afterwards set them, for the duties of life rather than for its business, and to open windows on every side of the mind where thickness of wall does not prevent it. Let our aim be as hitherto to give a good all-round education fitted to cope with as many exigencies of the day as possible. I had rather the college should turn out one of Aristotle s four-square men, capable of holding his own in whatever field he may be cast, than a score of lopsided ones de veloped abnormally in one direction. Our scheme should be adapted to the wants of the majority of under-graduates, to the ob jects that drew them hither, and to such training as will make the most of them after they come. Special aptitudes are sure to take care of themselves, but the latent pos sibilities of the average mind can only be discovered by experiment in many direc tions. When I speak of the average mind, I do not mean that the courses of study HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 241 should be adapted to the average level of intelligence, but to the highest, for in these matters it is wiser to grade upwards than downwards, since the best is the only thing that is good enough. To keep the wing- footed down to the pace of the leaden-soled disheartens the one without in the least en couraging the other. u Brains," says Ma- chiavelli, " are of three generations, those that understand of themselves, those that understand when another shows them, and those that understand neither of themselves nor by the showing of others." It is the first class that should set the stint ; the second will get on better than if they had set it themselves ; and the third will at least have the pleasure of watching the others show their paces. In the College proper, I repeat, for it is the birthday of the College that we are cele brating, it is the College that we love and of which we are proud, let it continue to give such a training as will fit the rich to be trusted with riches, and the poor to with stand the temptations of poverty. Give to History, give to Political Economy, that ample verge the times demand, but with no detriment to those liberal Arts which have 242 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. formed open-minded men and good citizens in the past, nor have lost the skill to form them. Let it be our hope to make a gentle man of every youth who is put under our charge; not a conventional gentleman, but a man of culture, a man of intellectual re source, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul. This we have tried to do in the past, this let us try to do in the future. We cannot do this for all, at best, perhaps only for the few ; but the influence for good of a highly trained intelligence and a harmoniously developed character is incalculable ; for though it be subtle and gradual in its operation, it is as pervasive as it is subtle. There may be few of these, there must be few, but That few is all the world which with a few Doth ever live and move and work and stirre. If these few can best be winnowed from the rest by the elective system of studies, if the drift of our colleges towards that system be general and involuntary, showing a demand for it in the conditions of American life, then I should wish to see it unfalteringly carried through. I am sure that the matter HARVARD ANNIVERSARY, 243 will be handled wisely and with all fore thought by those most intimately concerned in the government of the College. They who, on a tiny clearing pared from the edge of the woods, built here, most probably with the timber hewed from the trees they felled, our earliest hall, with the solitude of ocean behind them, the mystery of forest before them, and all about them a desolation, must surely (si quis animis celestibis locus) share our gladness and our gratitude at the splendid fulfilment of their vision. If we could but have preserved the humble roof which housed so great a future, Mr. Ruskin himself would almost have ad mitted that no castle or cathedral was ever richer in sacred associations, in pathos of the past, and in moral significance. They who reared it had the sublime prescience of that courage which fears only God, and could say confidently in the face of all dis couragement and doubt, " He hath led me forth into a large place; because he de lighted in me He hath delivered me." We cannot honor them too much ; we can repay them only by showing, as occasions rise, that we do not undervalue the worth of their example. 244 HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. Brethren of the Alumni, it now becomes my duty to welcome in your name the guests who have come, some of them so far, to share our congratulations and hopes to-day. I cannot name them all and give to each his fitting phrase. Thrice welcome to them all, and, as is fitting, first to those from abroad, representatives of illustrious seats of learn ing that were old in usefulness and fame when ours was in its cradle ; and next to those of our own land, from colleges and universities which, if not daughters of Har vard, are young enough to be so, and are one with her in heart and hope. I said that I should single out none by name, but I should not represent you fitly if I gave no special greeting to the gentleman who brings the message of John Harvard s College, Emmanuel. The welcome we give him could not be warmer than that which we offer to his colleagues, but we cannot help feeling that in pressing his hand our own instinctively closes a little more tightly, as with a sense of nearer kindred. There is also one other name of which it would be indecorous not to make an exception. You all know that I can mean only the President of our Republic. His presence is a signal HARVARD ANNIVERSARY. 245 honor to us all, and to us all I may say a personal gratification. We have no politics here, but the sons of Harvard all belong to the party which admires courage, strength of purpose, and fidelity to duty, and which respects, wherever he may be found, the Justum ac tenacem propositi virum, who knows how to withstand the Civium ardor prava jubentium. He has left the helm of state to be with us here, and so long as it is intrusted to his hands we are sure that, should the storm come, he will say with Seneca s Pilot, u O Neptune, you may save me if you will ; you may sink me if you will ; but whatever happen, I shall keep iny rudder true." tanbatD aitb SELECTED FROM THE CATALOGUE OF HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. Brooks Adams. The Emancipation of Massachusetts, crown 8vo. John Adams and Abigail Adams. Familiar Letters of, during the Revolution, I2mo, $2.00. Oscar Fay Adams. 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