Thomas B. Reed

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

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

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

In their halls I could not feel myself a stranger, and I resented the imputation of being a foreigner when I looked round upon the old portraits, all of whom were my countrymen as well as theirs, and some of whom had been among our founders and benefactors. In this year of reconciliations and atonements, too, the influence of college associations is of no secondary importance as a bond of union. On this day, in every State of our more than ever to be united country, there are men whose memories turn back tenderly and regretfully to those haunts of their early manhood. Our college also, stretching back as it does toward the past, and forward to an ever-expanding future, gives a sense of continuity which is some atonement for the brevity of life. These portraits that hang about us seem to make us contemporaries with generations that are gone, and the services we render her will make us in turn familiar to those who shall succeed us here. There is no way so cheap of buying what I may call a kind of mitigated immortality,—mean by that an immortality without the pains and penalty attached commonly to it, of being dug up once in fifty years to have your claims reconsidered [laughter]—as in giving something to the college. [Applause.] Nay, I will say in parenthesis, that even an intention to give it secures that place of which I have spoken. [Laughter.] I find in the records of the college an ancestor of my own recorded as having intended to give a piece of land. He remains there forever with his beneficent intention. It is not certain that he didn't carry it out. The land certainly never came to me, or I should make restitution. [Laughter and applause.]

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

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

But, gentlemen, I will not longer detain you with the inevitable suggestions of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from under him who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy foot of a cockney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace. I had a kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be unable to fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely here with a tablet in the wall before me inscribed: Guilielmo Roberto Ware, Henrico Van Brunt, optime de Academia meritis, eo quod facundiam postprandialem irritam fecerunt. I hope you understood my Latin [laughter], and I hope you will forgive me the antiquity of my pronunciation [laughter]; but it is simply because I cannot help it. Then on a blackboard behind me I could have written in large letters the names of our guests who should make some brief dumb show of acknowledgment. You, at least, with your united applause, could make yourselves heard. If brevity ever needed an excuse, I might claim one in the fact that I have consented at short notice to be one of the performers in our domestic centennial next Saturday, and poetry is not a thing to be delivered on demand without an exhausting wear upon the nerves. When I wrote to Dr. Holmes and begged for a little poem, I got the following answer, which I shall take the liberty of reading. I don't see the Doctor himself in the hall, which encourages me to go on:—

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

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

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

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NATIONAL GROWTH OF A CENTURY

[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at Cambridge, Mass., June 28, 1876. Mr. Lowell, as President of the Alumni Association, occupied the chair.]

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

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

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

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

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

But, brethren, as Charles Lamb said of Coleridge's motto, Sermoni propriori, this is more proper for a sermon than for a dinner-table. But birthdays, after all, gentlemen, are serious things; and as the chance of many more of them becomes precarious, and the approaching birthday of the nation begets in all of us, I should hope, something of a grave and meditative mood, it would be an indecorum to break in upon it too suddenly with the licensed levity of festival. You are waiting to hear other voices, and I trust my example of gravity may act rather as a warning than as precedent to those who are to follow me.

Brethren, at our table there is always one toast, that by custom and propriety takes precedence of all others. It is, I admit, rather an arduous task to pay the most many-sided man a different compliment year after year, and the President of the University must pardon me for saying that he gives a good deal of trouble to the President of the Alumni, as he is apt to do in the case of inefficient persons generally. [Laughter and applause.] One eminent quality, however, I can illustrate in a familiar Latin quotation, which, with your permission, I will put in two ways, thus securing, I should hope, the understanding of the older and younger among you: "Justum et tenacem propositi virum." [Mr. Lowell evoked considerable laughter by pronouncing the Latin according to the continental method.] I give you the health of President Eliot.

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THE STAGE

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

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen:—In listening to the kind words and still more in hearing the name of the gentleman who was kind enough to propose the toast to which I am replying, I cannot help recalling the words of one of your English poets:—

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

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

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

As I sat here, gentlemen, endeavoring to collect my thoughts and finding it, I may say, as difficult as to make a collection for any other charitable occasion [laughter], I could not help thinking that the Anglo-Saxon race—if you will allow me to use an expression which is sometimes criticised—that the Anglo-Saxon race has misinterpreted a familiar text of Scripture and reads it: "Out of the fulness of the mouth the heart speaketh." I confess that if Alexander, who once offered a reward for a new pleasure, were to come again upon earth, I should become one of the competitors for the prize, and I should offer for his consideration a festival at which there were no speeches. [Laughter.] The gentlemen of your profession have in one sense a great advantage over the rest of us. Your speeches are prepared for you by the cleverest men of your time or by the great geniuses for all time. You can be witty or wise at much less expense than those of us who are obliged to fall back upon our own resources. Now I admit that there is a great deal in the spur of the moment, but that depends very much upon the flank of the animal into which you dig it. There is also a great deal in that self-possessed extemporaneousness which a man carries in his pocket on a sheet of paper. It reminds one of the compliment which the Irishman paid to his own weapon, the shillalah, when he said: "It's a weapon which never misses fire." But then it may be said that it applies itself more directly to the head than to the heart. I think I have a very capital theory of what an after-dinner speech should be; we have had some examples this afternoon and I have made a great many excellent ones myself; but they were always on the way home, and after I had made a very poor one when I was on my legs. [Laughter.] My cabman has been the confidant of an amount of humor and apt quotations and clever sayings which you will never know, and which you will never guess. But something in what has been said by one of my countrymen recalls to my mind a matter of graver character. As a man who has lived all his life in the country, to my shame be it said I have not been an habitual theatre-goer. I came too late for the elder Kean. My theatrical experience began with Fanny Kemble—I forget how many years ago, but more than I care to remember—and I recollect the impression made upon me by her and by her father. I was too young to be critical; I was young enough to enjoy; but I remember that what remained with me and what remains with me still of what I heard and saw, and especially with regard to Charles Kemble, was the perfection of his art. It was not his individual characteristics—though of course I remember those—it was the perfection of his art. My countryman has alluded to the fact that at one time it was difficult for an actor to get a breakfast, much more to have one offered to him; and that recalls to my mind the touching words of the great master of your art, Shakespeare, who in one of his sonnets said:—

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

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

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

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

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

COMMERCE

Mr. Chairman, My Lords and Gentlemen:—I was a few moments ago discussing with my excellent friend upon the left what a diplomatist might be permitted to say, and I think the result of the discussion was that he was left to his choice between saying nothing that had any meaning or saying something that had several [laughter]; and as one of those diplomatists to whom the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs alluded a short time ago, I should rather choose the latter course, because it gives one afterwards a selection when the time for explanation comes round. [Laughter.]

I shall not detain you long, for I know that there are speakers both on the right and on the left of me who are impatient to burst the bud; and I know that I have not been selected for the pleasant duty that has been assigned to me for any merits of my own. [Cries of dissent.] You will allow me to choose my own reason, gentlemen. I repeat, I have not been chosen so much for my own merits as for the opportunity afforded you of giving expression to your kindness and good feeling towards the country I represent—a country which exemplifies what the colonies of England may come to if they are not wisely treated. [Laughter and cheers.] Speaking for myself and for one or two of my compatriots whom I see here present, I should certainly say that that was no unpleasant destiny in itself. But I do not, nor do my countrymen, desire that those great commonwealths which are now joined to England by so many filial ties should ever be separated from her.

I am asked to-night to propose the "Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom and of the World," and I might, if the clock did not warn me against it—["Go on!"] if my own temperament did not stand a little in the way—I might say to you something very solemn on the subject of commerce. I might say how commerce, if not a great civilizer in itself, had always been a great intermediary and vehicle of civilization. I might say that all the great commercial States have been centres of civilization, and centres of those forces which keep civilization from becoming stupid. I do not say which is the post and which the propter in this inference; but I do say that the two things have been almost invariably associated.

One word as to commerce in another relation which touches me more nearly. Commerce and the rights and advantages of commerce, ill understood and ignorantly interpreted, have often been the cause of animosities between nations. But commerce rightly understood is a great pacificator; it brings men face to face for barter. It is the great corrector of the eccentricities and enormities of nature and of the seasons, so that a bad harvest and a bad season in England is a good season for Minnesota, Kansas, and Manitoba.

But, gentlemen, I will not detain you longer. It gives me great pleasure to propose, as the representative of the United States, the toast of "The Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom and of the Whole World," with which I associate the names of Mr. C. M. Norwood, M. P., vice-president of the Associated Chambers of the United Kingdom, and the Hon. F. Strutt, president of the Derby Chamber. [Cheers.]

AFTER-DINNER SPEAKING

My Lord Coleridge, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen:—I confess that my mind was a little relieved when I found that the toast to which I am to respond rolled three gentlemen, Cerberus-like, into one [laughter], and when I saw Science pulling impatiently at the leash on my left, and Art on my right, and that therefore the responsibility of only a third part of the acknowledgment has fallen to me. You, my lord, have alluded to the difficulties of after-dinner oratory. I must say that I am one of those who feel them more keenly the more after-dinner speeches I make. [Laughter.] There are a great many difficulties in the way, and there are three principal ones, I think. The first is the having too much to say, so that the words, hurrying to escape, bear down and trample out the life of each other. The second is when, having nothing to say, we are expected to fill a void in the minds of our hearers. And I think the third, and most formidable, is the necessity of following a speaker who is sure to say all the things you meant to say, and better than you, so that we are tempted to exclaim, with the old grammarian, "Hang these fellows, who have said all our good things before us!" [Laughter.]

Now the fourth of July has several times been alluded to, and I believe it is generally thought that on that anniversary the spirit of a certain bird known to heraldic ornithologists—and I believe to them alone—as the spread eagle, enters into every American's breast, and compels him, whether he will or no, to pour forth a flood of national self-laudation. [Laughter and cheers.] This, I say, is the general superstition, and I hope that a few words of mine may serve in some sort to correct it. I ask you, if there is any other people who have confined their national self-laudation to one day in the year. [Laughter.] I may be allowed to make one remark as to a personal experience. Fortune has willed it that I should see as many—perhaps more—cities and manners of men as Ulysses; and I have observed one general fact, and that is, that the adjectival epithet which is prefixed to all the virtues is invariably the epithet which geographically describes the country that I am in. For instance, not to take any real name, if I am in the kingdom of Lilliput, I hear of the Lilliputian virtues. I hear courage, I hear common sense, and I hear political wisdom called by that name. If I cross to the neighboring Republic Blefusca—for since Swift's time it has become a Republic—I hear all these virtues suddenly qualified as Blefuscan. [Laughter.]

I am very glad to be able to thank Lord Coleridge for having, I believe for the first time, coupled the name of the President of the United States with that of her Majesty on an occasion like this. I was struck, both in what he said, and in what our distinguished guest of this evening said, with the frequent recurrence of an adjective which is comparatively new—I mean the word "English-speaking." We continually hear nowadays of the "English-speaking race," of the "English-speaking population." I think this implies, not that we are to forget, not that it would be well for us to forget, that national emulation and that national pride which is implied in the words "Englishman" and "American," but the word implies that there are certain perennial and abiding sympathies between all men of a common descent and a common language. [Cheers.] I am sure, my lord, that all you said with regard to the welcome which our distinguished guest will receive in America is true. His eminent talents as an actor, the dignified—I may say the illustrious—manner in which he has sustained the traditions of that succession of great actors who, from the time of Burbage to his own, have illustrated the English stage, will be as highly appreciated there as here. [Cheers.]

And I am sure that I may also say that the chief magistrate of England will be welcomed by the bar of the United States, of which I am an unworthy member, and perhaps will be all the more warmly welcomed that he does not come among them to practise. He will find American law administered—and I think he will agree with me in saying ably administered—by judges who, I am sorry to say, sit without the traditional wig of England. [Laughter.] I have heard since I came here friends of mine gravely lament this as something prophetic of the decay which was sure to follow so serious an innovation. I answered with a little story which I remember hearing from my father. He remembered the last clergyman in New England who still continued to wear the wig. At first it became a singularity and at last a monstrosity; and the good doctor concluded to leave it off. But there was one poor woman among his parishioners who lamented this sadly, and waylaying the clergyman as he came out of church she said, "Oh, dear doctor, I have always listened to your sermon with the greatest edification and comfort, but now that the wig is gone all is gone." [Laughter.] I have thought I have seen some signs of encouragement in the faces of my English friends after I have consoled them with this little story.

But I must not allow myself to indulge in any further remarks. There is one virtue, I am sure, in after-dinner oratory, and that is brevity; and as to that I am reminded of a story. [Laughter.] The Lord Chief Justice has told you what are the ingredients of after-dinner oratory. They are the joke, the quotation, and the platitude; and the successful platitude, in my judgment, requires a very high order of genius. I believe that I have not given you a quotation, but I am reminded of something which I heard when very young—the story of a Methodist clergyman in America. He was preaching at a camp meeting, and he was preaching upon the miracle of Joshua, and he began his sermon with this sentence: "My hearers, there are three motions of the sun. The first is the straightforward or direct motion of the sun; the second is the retrograde or backward motion of the sun; and the third is the motion mentioned in our text—'the sun stood still.'" [Laughter.]

Now, gentlemen, I don't know whether you see the application of the story—I hope you do. The after-dinner orator at first begins and goes straight forward—that is the straightforward motion of the sun. Next he goes back and begins to repeat himself—that is the backward motion of the sun. At last he has the good sense to bring himself to the end, and that is the motion mentioned in our text, as the sun stood still. [Great laughter, in the midst of which Mr. Lowell resumed his seat.]

"THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE"

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:—I cannot easily escape from some strength of emotion in listening to the words of my friend who has just sat down, unless I receive it on the shield which has generally been my protection against many of the sorrows and some of the hardships of life. I mean the shield of humor, and I shall, therefore, take less seriously than playfully the portrait that he has been kind enough to draw of me. It reminds me of a story I once heard of a young poet, who published his volume of verses and prefixed to it his own portrait drawn by a friendly artist. The endeavor of his life from that time forward was to look like the portrait that his friend had drawn. [Applause.] I shall make the same endeavor.

It is a great pleasure to me to come here to-day, not only because I have met some of the oldest friends of my life, but also that after having looked in the eyes of so many old English audiences I see face to face a new English one, and when I looked at them I was reminded of a family likeness and of that kinship of blood which unites us. When I look at you I see many faces that remind me of faces I saw on the other side of the water, and I feel that whether I speak there or here I am essentially speaking to one people. I am not going to talk about myself, and I am not going to make a speech. I have spoken so often for you on the other side of the water that I feel as though I had a certain claim, at least, to be put on the retired list. But I could not fail to observe a certain distrust of America that has peeped out in remarks made, sometimes in the newspapers, sometimes to myself, as to whether a man could live eight years out of America, without really preferring Europe. It seems to me to imply what I should call a very unworthy distrust in the powers of America to inspire affection. I feel to-day, in looking in your faces, somewhat as I did when I took my first walk over the hills after my return, and the tears came into my eyes as I was welcomed by the familiar wayside flowers, the trees, the birds that had been my earliest friends.

It seems to me that those who take such a view quite miscalculate the force of the affection that a man feels for his country. It is something deeper than a sentiment. If there were anything deeper, I should say it was something deeper than an instinct. It is that feeling of self-renunciation and of identification with another which Ruth expressed when she said: "Entreat me not to leave thee nor to depart from following after thee, for whither thou goest I will go: where thou livest I will live, and where thou diest there will I die also." That, it seems to me, is the instinctive feeling that a man has. At the same time, this does not exclude the having clear eyes to see the faults of one's country. I think that, as an old President of Harvard College said once to a person who was remonstrating with him: "But charity, doctor, charity." "Yes, I know; but charity has eyes and ears and won't be made a fool of." [Laughter.]

I notice a good many changes in coming home, a few of which I may, perhaps, be allowed to touch upon. I notice a great growth in luxury, inevitable, I suppose, and which may have good in it—more good, perhaps, than I can see. I notice, also, one change that has impressed me profoundly, and when I hear that New England is drawing away, I cannot help thinking to myself how much more prosperous the farms look than they did when I was young; how much more neat is the farming, how much greater the attention to what will please the eye about the farm, as the planting of flowers and trimming the grass, which seems to me a very good sign. I had an opportunity, by a strange accident, of becoming very intimate with the outward appearance of New England during my youth by going about when a little boy with my father when he went on exchanges. He always went in his own vehicle, and he sometimes drove as far west as Northampton. I do not wish to detain you on this point, except as it interested me and is now first in my mind.

While I was in England I had occasion once to address them on the subject of Democracy, and I could not help thinking when I came up here that I was coming to one of its original sources, for certain it is that in the village community of New England, in its "plain living and high thinking," began that social equality which afterwards developed on the political side into what we call Democracy. And Democracy—while surely we cannot claim for it that it is perfect—yet Democracy, it seems to me, is the best expedient hitherto invented by mankind, not for annihilating distinctions and equalities, for that is impossible, but, so far as it is humanly possible, for compensating them. Here in our little towns in the last century, people met without thinking of it on a high table-land of common manhood. There was no sense of presumption from below, there was no possibility of condescension from above, because there was no above and below in the community. Learning was always respected in the clergyman, in the doctor, in the squire, the justice of the peace, and the rest of the community. This made no artificial distinction.

I observe, also, that our people are getting over their very bad habit with regard to politics, for Democracy, you must remember, lays a heavier burden on the individual conscience than any other form of government; and I have been glad to observe that we have been getting over that habit of thinking that our institutions will go of themselves. Now it seems to me that there is no machine of human construction, or into which the wit of man has entered, that can go of itself without supervision, without oiling; that there are no wheels which will revolve without our help, except the great wheel of the constellations or that great circle of the sun's which has its hand upon the dial plate, and which was made by a hand much less fallible than ours.

It also pleases me very much to see a friend whose constancy, whose faith, and whose courage have done so much more than any other man's to bring about that reform [great applause], though when I speak of civil service reform the friend who stands at our elbow on all these occasions will suggest to me a certain parallel, that is, that as Mr. Curtis is here to-day and I am here to-day, it reminds one of the temperance lecturer who used to go about carrying with him an unhappy person as the awful example [great laughter], and it may have flickered before some of your minds that I was the "awful example" of the very reform I had preached. However, I say that it is to me a very refreshing thing to find that this old happy-go-lucky feeling about our institutions has a very good chance of passing away.

One thing which always impressed me on the other side of the water as an admirable one, and as one which gave them a certain advantage over us, is the number of men who train themselves specifically for politics, for government. We are apt to forget, over here, that the art of governing men, as it is the highest, so it is the most difficult, of all arts. We are particular how our boots are made, but about our constitutions we "trust in the Lord," without even, as Cromwell advised, keeping our powder dry. We commit the highest destinies of this Republic, which some of us hope bears the hope of the world in her womb—to whom? Certainly not always to those who are most fit on any principle of natural selection: certainly, sometimes to those who are most unfit on any principle of selection,—and this is a very serious matter, for if you will allow me to speak with absolute plainness, no country that allows itself to be governed for a moment by its blackguards is safe. [Applause.] That was written before the United States of America existed. It is one of the truths of human nature and of destiny. If I were a man who had any political aspiration,—which, thank Heaven, I have not,—if I had any official aspiration—which, thank Heaven, also, I have not,—I should come home here, and when I first met an American audience I should say to them: My friends, America can learn nothing of Europe; Europe must come to school here. You have the tallest monument, you have the biggest waterfall, you have the highest tariff of any country in the world. [Great laughter and applause.] I would tell you that the last census showed that you had gained so many millions, as if the rabbits did not beat us in that way of multiplication, as if it counted for anything! It seems to me that what we make of our several millions is the vital question for us.

I was very much interested in what Prof. Stanley Hall said. I am heretic enough to have doubted whether our common schools are the panacea we have been inclined to think them. I was exceedingly interested in what he said about the education which a boy gained on the hills here. It seems to me we are going to fall back into the easy belief that because our common schools teach more than they used—and in my opinion much more than they ought—we can dispense with the training of the household. When Mr. Harrison [J. P. Harrison, author of "Some Dangerous Tendencies in American Life," one of the preceding speakers] was telling us of the men who were obliged to labor without hope from one end of the day to the other, and one end of the year to the other, he added, what is quite true—that, perhaps, after all, they are happier than that very large class of men who have leisure without culture, and whose sole occupation is either the killing of game or the killing of time—that is the killing of the most valuable possession that we have.

But I will not detain you any longer for, as I did say, I did not come here to make a speech, and I did not know what I was going to say when I came. I generally, on such occasions, trust to the spur of the moment, and sometimes the moment forgets its spur. [Laughter and applause.]

LITERATURE

Your Royal Highnesses, My Lords, and Gentlemen:—I think that I can explain who the artist might have been who painted the reversed rainbow of which the Professor[11] has just spoken. I think, after hearing the too friendly remarks made about myself, that he was probably some artist who was to answer for his art at a dinner of the Royal Society; and, naturally, instead of painting the bow of hope, he painted the reverse, the bow of despair. [Laughter.] When I received your invitation, Mr. President, to answer for "Literature," I was too well aware of the difficulties of your position not to know that your choice of speakers must be guided much more by the necessities of the occasion than by the laws of natural selection. [Laughter and cheers.] I remembered that the dictionaries give a secondary meaning to the phrase "to answer for," and that is the meaning which implies some expedient for an immediate necessity, as, for example, when one takes shelter under a tree from shower he is said to make the tree answer for shelter. [Laughter.] I think even an umbrella in the form of a tree has certainly one very great advantage over its artificial namesake—viz., that it cannot be borrowed, not even for the exigencies for which the instrument made of twilled silk is made use of, as those certainly will admit who have ever tried it during one of those passionate paroxysms of weather to which the Italian climate is unhappily subject. [Laughter.]

I shall not attempt to answer for Literature, for it appears to me that Literature, of all other things, is the one which most naturally is expected to answer for itself. It seems to me that the old English phrase with regard to a man in difficulties, which asks: "What is he going to do about it?" perhaps should be replaced in this period of ours, when the foundations of everything are being sapped by universal discussion, with the more pertinent question: "What is he going to say about it?" ["Hear! Hear!" and laughter.] I suppose that every man sent into the world with something to say to his fellow-men could say it better than anyone else if he could only find out what it was. I am sure that the ideal after-dinner speech is waiting for me somewhere with my address upon it, if I could only be so lucky as to come across it. I confess that hard necessity, or, perhaps I may say, too soft good nature, has compelled me to make so many unideal ones that I have almost exhausted my natural stock of universally applicable sentiment and my acquired provision of anecdote and allusion. I find myself somewhat in the position of Heine, who had prepared an elaborate oration for his first interview with Goethe, and when the awful moment arrived could only stammer out that the cherries on the road to Weimar were uncommonly fine. [Laughter.]

But, fortunately, the duty which is given to me to-night is not so onerous as might be implied in the sentiment that has called me up. I am consoled, not only by the lexicographer as to the meaning of the phrase "to answer for," but also by an observation of mine, which is, that speakers on an occasion like this are not always expected to allude except in distant and vague terms to the subject on which they are specially supposed to talk.

Now, I have a more pleasing and personal duty, it appears to me, on this my first appearance before an English audience on my return to England. It gives me great pleasure to think that, in calling upon me, you call upon me as representing two things which are exceedingly dear to me, and which are very near to my heart. One is that I represent in some sense the unity of English literature under whatever sky it may be produced; and the other is that I represent also that friendliness of feeling, based on a better understanding of each other, which is growing up between the two branches of the British stock. [Cheers.] I could wish that my excellent successor here as American Minister could fill my place to-night, for I am sure that he is as fully inspired as I ever was with a desire to draw closer the ties of friendship between the mother and the daughter, and could express it in a more eloquent and more emphatic manner than even I myself could do—at any rate in a more authoritative manner.

For myself, I have only to say that I come back from my native land confirmed in my love of it and in my faith in it. I come back also full of warm gratitude for the feeling that I find in England; I find in the old home a guest-chamber prepared for me, and a warm welcome. [Cheers.] Repeating what his Royal Highness the Commander-in-Chief has said, that every man is bound in duty, if he were not bound in affection and loyalty, to put his own country first, I may be allowed to steal a leaf out of the book of my adopted fellow-citizens in America; and while I love my native country first, as is natural, I may be allowed to say I love the country next best which I cannot say has adopted me, but which, I will say, has treated me with such kindness, where I have met with such universal kindness from all classes and degrees of people, that I must put that country at least next in my affection.

I will not detain you longer. I know that the essence of speaking here is to be brief, but I trust that I shall not lay myself open to the reproach that in my desire to be brief I have resulted in making myself obscure. [Laughter.] I hope I have expressed myself explicitly enough; but I would venture to give another translation of Horace's words, and say that I desire to be brief, and therefore I efface myself. [Laughter and cheers.]

INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:—I confess that I rise under a certain oppression. There was a time when I went to make an after-dinner speech with a light heart, and when on my way to the dinner I could think over my exordium in my cab and trust to the spur of the moment for the rest of my speech. But I find as I grow older a certain aphasia overtakes me, a certain inability to find the right word precisely when I want it; and I find also that my flank becomes less sensitive to the exhilarating influences of that spur to which I have just alluded. I had pretty well made up my mind not to make any more after-dinner speeches. I had an impression that I had made quite enough of them for a wise man to speak, and perhaps more than it was profitable for other wise men to listen to. [Laughter.] I confess that it was with some reluctance that I consented to speak at all to-night. I had been bethinking me of the old proverb of the pitcher and the well which is mentioned, as you remember, in the proverb; and it was not altogether a consolation to me to think that that pitcher, which goes once too often to the well, belongs to the class which is taxed by another proverb with too great length of ears. [Laughter.] But I could not resist. I certainly felt that it was my duty not to refuse myself to an occasion like this—an occasion which deliberately emphasizes, as well as expresses, that good feeling between our two countries which, I think, every good man in both of them is desirous to deepen and to increase. If I look back to anything in my life with satisfaction, it is to the fact that I myself have, in some degree, contributed—and I hope I may believe the saying to be true—to this good feeling. [Applause.]

You alluded, Mr. Chairman, to a date which gave me, I must confess, what we call on the other side of the water "a rather large contract." I am to reply, I am to answer to Literature, and I must confess that a person like myself, who first appeared in print fifty years ago, would hardly wish to be answerable for all his own literature, not to speak of the literature of other people. But your allusion to sixty years ago reminded me of something which struck me as I looked down these tables.

Sixty years ago the two authors you mentioned, Irving and Cooper, were the only two American authors of whom anything was known in Europe, and the knowledge of them in Europe was mainly confined to England. It is true that Bryant's "Water-Fowl" had already begun its flight in immortal air, but these were the only two American authors that could be said to be known in England. And what is even more remarkable, they were the only American authors at that time—there were, and had been, others known to us at home—who were capable of earning their bread by their pens. Another singular change is suggested to me as I look down these tables, and that is the singular contrast they afford between the time when Johnson wrote his famous lines about those ills that assail the life of the scholar, and by the scholar he meant the author—

"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol."

And I confess when I remember that verse it strikes me as a singular contrast that I should meet with a body of authors who are able to offer a dinner instead of begging one; that I have sat here and seen "forty feeding like one," when one hundred years ago the one fed like forty when he had the chance. [Laughter.]

You have alluded also, in terms which I shall not qualify, to my own merits. You have made me feel a little as if I were a ghost revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon, and reading with considerable wonder my own epitaph. But you have done me more than justice in attributing so much to me with regard to International Copyright. You are quite right in alluding to Mr. Putnam, who, I think, wrote the best pamphlet that has been written on the subject; and there are others you did not name who also deserve far more than I do for the labor they have expended and the zeal they have shown on behalf of International Copyright, particularly the secretaries of our international society—Mr. Lathrop and Mr. G. W. Green. And since I could not very well avoid touching upon the subject of International Copyright, I must say that all American authors without exception have been in favor of it on the moral ground, on the ground of simple justice to English authors. But there were a great many local, topical considerations, as our ancestors used to call them, that we were obliged to take into account, and which, perhaps, you do not feel as keenly here as we did. But I think we may say that the almost unanimous conclusion of American authors latterly has been that we should be thankful to get any bill that recognized the principle of international copyright, being confident that its practical application would so recommend it to the American people that we should get afterwards, if not every amendment of it that we desire, at least every one that is humanly possible. I think that perhaps a little injustice has been done to our side of the question; I think a little more heat has been imported into it than was altogether wise. I am not so sure that our American publishers were so much more wicked than their English brethren would have been if they had had the chance. [Laughter.] I cannot, I confess, accept with patience any imputation that implies that there is anything in our climate or in our form of government that tends to produce a lower standard of morality than in other countries. The fact is that it has been partly due to a certain—may I speak of our ancestors as having been qualified by a certain dulness? I mean no disrespect, but I think it is due to the stupidity of our ancestors in making a distinction between literary property and other property. That has been at the root of the whole evil.

I, of course understand, as everybody understands, that all property is the creature of municipal law. But you must remember that it is the conquest of civilization, that when property passes beyond the boundaries of that municipium it is still sacred. It is not even yet sacred in all respects and conditions. Literature, the property in an idea, has been something that it is very difficult for the average man to comprehend. It is not difficult for the average man to comprehend that there may be property in a form which genius or talent gives to an idea. He can see it. It is visible and palpable, this property in an idea when it is exemplified in a machine, but it is hardly so apprehensible when it is subtly interfused in literature. Books have always been looked on somewhat as ferÆ naturÆ, and if you have ever preserved pheasants you know that when they fly over your neighbor's boundaries he may take a pot shot at them. I remember that something more than thirty years ago Longfellow, my friend and neighbor, asked me to come and eat a game pie with him. Longfellow's books had been sold in England by the tens of thousands, and that game pie—and you will observe the felicity of its being a game pie, ferÆ naturÆ always you see—was the only honorarium he had ever received from this country for reprinting his works.

I cannot help feeling as I stand here that there is something especially—I might almost use a cant word and say monumentally—interesting in a meeting like this. It is the first time that English and American authors, so far as I know, have come together in any numbers, I was going to say to fraternize, when I remembered that I ought perhaps to add to "sororize." We, of course, have no desire, no sensible man in England or America has any desire, to enforce this fraternization at the point of the bayonet. Let us go on criticising each other; it is good for both of us. We Americans have been sometimes charged with being a little too sensitive; but perhaps a little indulgence may be due to those who always have their faults told to them, and the reference to whose virtues perhaps is sometimes conveyed in a foot-note in small print. I think that both countries have a sufficiently good opinion of themselves to have a fairly good opinion of each other. They can afford it; and if difficulties arise between the two countries, as they unhappily may,—and when you alluded just now to what De Tocqueville said in 1828 you must remember that it was only thirteen years after our war,—you must remember how long it has been to get in the thin end of the wedge of International Copyright; you must remember it took our diplomacy nearly one hundred years to enforce its generous principle of the alienable allegiance, and that the greater part of the bitterness which De Tocqueville found in 1828 was due to the impressment of American seamen, of whom something like fifteen hundred were serving on board English ships when at last they were delivered. These things should be remembered, not with resentment but for enlightenment. But whatever difficulties occurred between the two countries, and there may be difficulties that are serious, I do not think there will be any which good sense and good feeling cannot settle. [Applause.]

I think I have been told often enough to remember that my countrymen are apt to think that they are in the right, that they are always in the right; that they are apt to look at their side of the question only. Now, this conduces certainly to peace of mind and imperturbability of judgment, whatever other merits it may have. I am sure I do not know where we got it. Do you? I also sympathize most heartily with what has been said by the chairman with regard to the increasing love for England among my countrymen. I find on inquiry that they stop longer and in greater numbers every year in the old home, and feel more deeply its manifold charms. They also are beginning to feel that London is the centre of the races that speak English, very much in the sense that Rome was the centre of the ancient world. And I confess that I never think of London, which I also confess that I love, without thinking of that palace which David built, sitting in hearing of a hundred streams—streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity. And one other thing about London, if I may be allowed to refer to myself, impresses me beyond any other sound I have ever heard, and that is the low, unceasing roar that one hears always in the air. It is not a mere accident, like the tempest or the cataract, but it is impressive because it always indicates human will and impulse and conscious movement, and I confess that when I hear it I almost feel that I am listening to the roaring loom of time. A few words more. I will only say this, that we, as well as you, have inherited a common trust in the noble language which, in its subtle compositiveness, is perhaps the most admirable instrument of human thought and human feeling and cunning that has ever been unconsciously devised by man. May our rivalries be in fidelity to that trust. We have also inherited certain traditions, political and moral, and in doing our duty towards these it seems to me that we shall find quite enough occupation for our united thought and feeling. [Long-continued applause.]