Modern Eloquence Volume Iii Part 23

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--The posture of my mind the last fortnight relative to the duty of the present hour--which, indeed, I was proud to be a.s.signed to, as I ought to have been, but which has been a black care to me ever since I undertook it--has a not inapt ill.u.s.tration in the case of the old New England parson who, when asked why he was going to do a certain thing that had been laid upon him, yet the thought of which affected him with extreme timidity, answered: "I wouldn't if I didn't suppose it had been foreordained from all eternity--and I'm a good mind to not as it is."

[Laughter.] However, I have the undisguised good-will of my audience to begin with, and that's half the battle. The forefathers, in whose honor we meet, were men of good-will, profoundly so; but they were, in their day, more afraid of showing it, in some forms, than their descendants happily are.

The first time I ever stood in the pulpit to preach was in the meeting-house of the ancient Connecticut town where I was brought up.

That was a great day for our folks and all my old neighbors, you may depend. After benediction, when I pa.s.sed out into the vestibule, I was the recipient there of many congratulatory expressions. Among my friends in the crowd was an aged deacon, a man in whom survived, to a rather remarkable degree, the original New England Puritan type, who had known me from the cradle, and to whom the elevation I had reached was as gratifying as it could possibly be to anybody. But when he saw the smile of favor focussed on me there, and me, I dare say, appearing to bask somewhat in it, the dear old man took alarm. He was apprehensive of the consequences to that youngster. And so, taking me by the hand and wrestling down his natural feelings--he was ready to cry for joy--he said: "Well, Joseph, I hope you'll live to preach a great deal better than that!" [Laughter.] It was an exceedingly appropriate remark, and a very tender one if you were at the bottom of it.

That severe, undemonstrative New England habit, that emotional reserve and self-suppression, though it lingers here and there, has mostly pa.s.sed away and is not to be regretted. As much as could be has been made of it to our forefathers' discredit, as has been made of everything capable of being construed unfavorably to them. They to whom what they call the cant of the Puritan is an offence, themselves have established and practise a distinct anti-Puritan cant with which we are all familiar. The very people who find it abhorrent and intolerable that they were such censors of the private life of their contemporaries, do not scruple to bring to bear on their private life a search-light that leaves no accessible nook of it unexplored, and regarding any unpretty trait espied by that unsparing inquest the rule of judgment persistently employed--as one is obliged to perceive--tends to be: "No explanation wanted or admitted but the worst." [Applause.]

Accordingly, the infestive deportment characteristic of the New England colonist has been extensively interpreted as the indisputable index of his sour and morose spirit, begotten of his religion. I often wonder that, in computing the cause of his rigorous manners, so inadequate account is wont to be made of his situation, as in a princ.i.p.al and long-continuing aspect substantially military--which it was. The truth is, his physiognomy was primarily the soldier stamp on him.

If you had been at Gettysburg on the morning of July 2, 1863, as I was, and had perused the countenance of the First and Eleventh Corps, exhausted and bleeding with the previous day's losing battle, and the countenance of the Second, Third, and Twelfth Corps, getting into position to meet the next onset, which everybody knew was immediately impending, you would have said that it was a sombre community--that Army of the Potomac--with a good deal of grimness in the face of it; with a notable lack of the playful element, and no fiddling or other fine arts to speak of.

As sure as you live, gentlemen, that is no unfair representation of how it was with the founders of the New England commonwealths in their planting period.

The Puritan of the seventeenth century lived, moved, and had his being on the field of an undecided struggle for existence--the New England Puritan most emphatically so. He was under arms in body much of the time--in mind all the time. Nothing can be truer than to say that. And yet people everlastingly pick and poke at him for being stern-featured and deficient in the softer graces of life.

It was his beauty that he was so, for it grew out of and was befitting his circ.u.mstances. And I, for one, love to see that austere demeanor so far as it is yet hereditary on the old soil--and some of it is left--thinking of its origin. It is the signature of a fighting far more than of an ascetic ancestry--memorial of a new Pa.s.s of Thermopylae held by the latest race of Spartans on the sh.o.r.es of a new world. [Applause.]

It may be doubted if ever in the history of mankind was displayed a quality of public courage--of pure, indomitable pluck--surpa.s.sing that of the New England plantations in their infant day. No condition of its extremest proof was lacking. While the Bay Colony, for example, was in the pinch of its first wrestle with Nature for a living, much as ever able to furnish its table with a piece of bread--with the hunger-wolf never far away from the door, and behind that wolf the Narragansett and the Pequot, at what moment to burst into savagery none could tell--in the season when mere existence was the purchase of physical toil, universal and intense, and of watching night and day--there came from the old country, from the high places of authority, the peremptory mandate: Send us back that charter! Under the clause of it granting you the rule of your own affairs, you are claiming more than was intended or can be allowed. Send it back! And what was the answer? Mind, there were less than 5,000 souls of them, all told: less than 1,000 grown men. On the one hand the power of England--on the other that sc.r.a.p of a new-born State, sore pressed with difficulties already.

What was the answer? Why, they got out some old cannon they had and mounted them, and moulded a stock of bullets, and distributed powder, and took of every male citizen above the age of sixteen an oath of allegiance to Ma.s.sachusetts--and then set their teeth and waited to see what would happen. And that was their answer. It meant distinctly: Our charter, which we had of the King's majesty (and therefore came we hither), is our lawful possession--fair t.i.tle to the territory we occupy and the rights we here exercise. And whoever wants it has got to come and take it. Surrender it we never will! [Applause.]

Nor was that the only time. Again and again during the Colony's initial stage, when it was exceedingly little of stature and had enough to do to keep the breath of life in it, that demand was renewed with rising anger and with menaces; yet never could those Puritans of the Bay be scared into making a solitary move of any kind toward compliance with it. David with his sling daring Goliath in armor is an insufficient figure of that nerve, that transcendent grit, that superb gallantry. Where will you look for its parallel? I certainly do not know. [Applause.]

They used to tell during the war of a colonel who was ordered to a.s.sault a position which his regiment, when they had advanced far enough to get a good look at it, saw to be so impossible that they fell back and became immovable. Whereupon (so the story ran) the colonel, who took the same sense of the situation that his command did, yet must do his duty, called out in an ostensibly pleading and fervid voice: "Oh, don't give it up so! Forward again! Forward! Charge! Great heavens, men, do you want to live forever?" [Laughter.]

How those first New England Puritans we are speaking of were to come off from their defiance of the crown alive could scarcely be conjectured.

The only ally they had was distance. The thing they ventured on was the chance that the Royal Government, which had troubles nearer home, would have its hands too full to execute its orders 3,000 miles away across the sea by force. But they accepted all hazards whatsoever of refusing always to obey those orders. They held on to their charter like grim death, and they kept it in their time. More than once or twice it seemed as good as gone; but delay helped them; turns of events helped them; G.o.d's providence delivered them, they thought; anyhow, they kept it; that intrepid handful against immeasurable odds, mainly because it lay not in the power of mortal man to intimidate them. And I contend that, all things considered, no more splendid exhibition of the essential stuff of manhood stands on human record. They were no hot-heads. All that while, rash as they appeared, their pulse was calm. The justifying reasons of their course were ever plain before their eyes. They were of the kind of men who understood their objects.

The representative of an English newspaper, sent some time since to Ireland to move about and learn by personal observation the real political mind of the people there, reported on his return that he had been everywhere and talked with all sorts, and that as nearly as he could make out, the att.i.tude of the Irish might be stated about thus: "They don't know what they want--and they are bound to have it."

[Laughter.]

But those unbending Forefathers well knew what they wanted that charter for. It was their legal guarantee of the privilege of a s.p.a.cious freedom, civil and religious, and all that they did and risked for its sake is witness of the price at which they held that privilege. It was not that they had any special objection to the interference in the province of their domestic administration of the king as a king; for you find them presently crying "Hands Off!" to the Puritan Parliament as strenuously as ever they said it to the agents of Charles I. It was simply and positively the value they set on the self-governing independence that had been pledged them at the beginning of the enterprise.

And who that has a man's heart in him but must own that their inspiration to such a degree, with such an idea and sentiment in the time, place, and circ.u.mstances in which they stood, was magnificent? Was the inexorable unrelaxing determination with which they, being so few and so poor, maintained their point somewhat wrought into their faces?

Very probably. Strange if it had not been. Of course, it was. But if they were stern-visaged in their day, it was that we in our day, which in vision they foresaw, might of all communities beneath the sun have reason for a cheerful countenance. [Applause.]

They achieved immense great things for us, those Puritan men who were not smiling enough to suit the critics. The real foundation on which the structure of American national liberty subsequently rose was laid by them in those first heroic years.

And what a marvel it was, when you stop to think, that in conditions so hard, so utterly prosaic, calculated to clip the wings of generous thought, they maintained themselves in that elevation of sentiment, that supreme estimate of the unmaterial, the ideal factors of life that distinguished them--in such largeness of mind and of spirit altogether.

While confronting at deadly close quarters their own necessities and perils, their sympathies were wide as the world. To their brethren in old England, contending with tyranny, every s.h.i.+p that crossed the Atlantic carried their benediction. Look at the days of thanksgiving and of fast with which they followed the s.h.i.+fting fortunes of the wars of Protestantism--which were wars for humanity--on the continent! Look at the vital consequence they attached to the interest of education; at the taxes that in their penury, and while for the most part they still lived in huts, they imposed on themselves to found and to sustain the inst.i.tution of the school! [Applause.]

"Child," said a matron of primitive New England to her young son, "if G.o.d make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that ever thy mother asked for thee." And so saying she spoke like a true daughter of the Puritans.

They were poets--those brave, stanch, aspiring souls, whose will was adamant and who feared none but G.o.d. Only, as Charles Kingsley has said, they did not sing their poetry like birds, but acted it like men.

[Applause.] It was their high calling to stand by the divine cause of human progress at a momentous crisis of its evolution, and they were worthy to be put on duty at that post. Evolution! I hardly dare speak the word, knowing so little about the thing. It represents a very great matter, which I am humbly conscious of being about as far from surrounding as was a simple-minded Irish priest I have been told of, who, having heard that we were descended from monkeys, yet not quite grasping the chronology of the business, the next time he visited a menagerie, gave particular and patient attention to a large cage of our alleged poor relations on exhibition there. He stood for a long time intently scrutinizing their human-like motions, gestures, and expressions. By and by he fancied that the largest of them, an individual of a singularly grave demeanor, seated at the front of the cage, gave him a glance of intelligence. The glance was returned. A palpable wink followed, which also was returned, as were other like signals; and so it went on until his Reverence, having cast an eye around to see that n.o.body was observing him, leaned forward and said, in a low, confidential tone: "Av ye'll spake one w-u-r-r-d, I'll baptize ye, begorra!" [Laughter.]

But, deficient as one's knowledge of evolution, scientifically and in detail, may be, he may have attained to a not unintelligent perception of the all-embracing creative process called by that name as that in which, in the whole range of the advancing universal movement of life, what is ascends from what was, and fulfils it.

And what I wish to say for my last word is, that whoever of us in tracing back along the line of its potent and fruitful sources that which is his n.o.blest heritage as an American and a member of the English race, leaves out that hard-featured forefather of ours on the sh.o.r.e of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century, and makes not large account of the tremendous fight he fought which was reflected in the face he wore, misses a chief explanation of the fortune to which we and our children are born. [Loud applause.]

JOHN TYNDALL

ART AND SCIENCE

[Speech of Professor John Tyndall at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1888. The toast to Science was coupled with that to Literature, to the latter of which William E.

H. Lecky was called upon to respond. In introducing Professor Tyndall, the President, Sir Frederic Leighton, said: "On behalf of Science, on whom could I call more fitly than on my old friend Professor Tyndall. ["Hear! Hear!"] Fervid in imagination, after the manner of his race, clothing thoughts luminous and full of color in a sharply chiselled form, he seems to me to be, in very deed, an artist and our kin; and I, as an artist, rejoice to see that in this priest within the temple of Science, Knowledge has not clipped the wings of wonder, and that to him the tint of Heaven is not the less lovely that he can reproduce its azure in a little phial, nor does, because Science has been said to unweave it, the rainbow lift its arc less triumphantly in the sky."]

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN: Faraday, whose standing in the science of the world needs not to be insisted on, used to say to me that he knew of only two festivals that gave him real pleasure. He loved to meet, on Tower Hill, the frank and genial gentlemen-sailors of the Trinity House; but his crowning enjoyment was the banquet of the Royal Academy. The feeling thus expressed by Faraday is a representative feeling: for surely it is a high pleasure to men of science to mingle annually in this ill.u.s.trious throng, and it is an honor and a pleasure to hear the toast of Science so cordially proposed and so warmly responded to year after year.

Art and Science in their widest sense cover nearly the whole field of man's intellectual action. They are the outward and visible expressions of two distinct and supplementary portions of our complex human nature--distinct, but not opposed, the one working by the dry light of the intellect, the other in the warm glow of the emotions; the one ever seeking to interpret and express the beauty of the universe, the other ever searching for its truth. One vast personality in the course of history, and one only, seems to have embraced them both. ["Hear! Hear!"]

That transcendent genius died three days ago plus three hundred and sixty-nine years--Leonardo da Vinci.

Emerson describes an artist who could never paint a rock until he had first understood its geological structure; and the late Lord Houghton told me that an ill.u.s.trious living poet once destroyed some exquisite verses on a flower because on examination he found that his botany was wrong. This is not saying that all the geology in the world, or all the botany in the world, could create an artist.

In ill.u.s.tration of the subtle influences which here come into play, a late member of this Academy once said to me--"Let Raphael take a crayon in his hand and sweep a curve; let an engineer take tracing paper and all other appliances necessary to accurate reproduction, and let him copy that curve--his line will not be the line of Raphael." In these matters, through lack of knowledge, I must speak, more or less, as a fool, leaving it to you, as wise men, to judge what I say. Rules and principles are profitable and necessary for the guidance of the growing artist and for the artist full-grown; but rules and principles, I take it, just as little as geology and botany, can create the artist.

Guidance and rule imply something to be guided and ruled. And that indefinable something which baffles all a.n.a.lysis, and which when wisely guided and ruled emerges in supreme excellence, is individual genius, which, to use familiar language, is "the gift of G.o.d." [Cheers.]

In like manner all the precepts of Bacon, linked together and applied in one great integration, would fail to produce a complete man of science.

In this respect Art and Science are identical--that to reach their highest outcome and achievement they must pa.s.s beyond knowledge and culture, which are understood by all, to inspiration and creative power, which pa.s.s the understanding even of him who possesses them in the highest degree. [Cheers.]

GEORGE ROE VAN DE WATER

DUTCH TRAITS

[Speech of Rev. Dr. George R. Van de Water at the eighth annual dinner of the Holland Society of New York, January 15, 1893. The President, Judge Augustus Van Wyck, said: "The next toast is: 'Holland--a lesson to oppressors, an example to the oppressed, and a sanctuary for the rights of mankind.' This toast will be responded to by one of the greatest stars in New York's constellation of the Emba.s.sadors of Him on High--Rev. Dr. George R.

Van de Water, rector of St. Andrew's Church, Harlem."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND MEMBERS OF THE HOLLAND SOCIETY:--One loves to observe a fitness in things. There is manifest fitness in one coming to New York from Harlem to speak to the members of the Holland Society and their friends. There is also manifest fitness in taking the words of this country's earliest benefactor, the Marquis de Lafayette, and, removing them from their original a.s.sociation with this fair and favored land, applying them to that little but lovely, lowly yet lofty, country of the Netherlands. Geologists tell us that, minor considerations waived, the character of a stream can be discerned as well anywhere along its course as at its source. Whether this be true or not, anything that can be said of the fundamental principles of liberty, upon which our national fabric has been built, can be said with even increased emphasis of the free States of the Netherlands.

From the Dutch our free America has secured the inspiration of her chartered liberties. Of the Dutch, then, we can appropriately say, as Lafayette once said of free America, "They are a lesson to oppressors, an example to the oppressed, and a sanctuary for the rights of mankind."

We are here to-night to glorify the Dutch. Fortunately for us, to do this we have not by the addition of so much as a jot or a t.i.ttle to magnify history. The facts are sufficient to justify our boast and fortify our pride. We need to detract nothing from other nationalities that have contributed much to the formation of our modern national conglomerate, although it is easily seen that the superior qualities of other nations have had a large infusion of Dutch virtue. All that we claim is that no nation under the heavens can make such an exhibit of marvellous success against adverse circ.u.mstances as does Holland. From the days when Julius Caesar mentions their bravery under the name of Batavians, to the notable time when, voluntarily a.s.suming the t.i.tle of reproach, they became "the beggars of the sea," and for nearly a century fought for their chartered rights against the most powerful and unscrupulous of foes, the Dutch have shown the most splendid of human virtues in most conspicuous light. In doing this they have made a n.o.ble name for themselves, and furnished the worthiest of examples for all the nations of the earth. This is not the time nor the place to deal with mere facts of history. Yet I take it that even this jolly a.s.sembly will take pleasure in the mention of the deeds that have now become eternally historic. Who that knows anything of the son of Charles V, who in 1555 made promises to Holland that he never meant to keep, and for years after sought in every way to break; who that has ever read of this fanatical, heartless, cruel, and despotic Philip II of Spain, or of that wonderful, pure, magnanimous, n.o.blest Dutchman of all, William of Orange, or of that fickle and false Margaret of Parma, the wicked sister in Holland, who lived to execute the will of a wicked brother in Spain, or of those monsters at the head of Spanish armies, Alva, Requesens, and Don Juan; who that has been fired by the sieges of Leyden and Haarlem, by the a.s.sa.s.sinations concocted in the Council of Blood, by the patient, faithful, undying patriotism of the Netherlanders in protesting for the truth of G.o.d and the rights of man, will need any response to the toast "a lesson to oppressors"? A little land, fighting for the right, succeeded in overcoming the power of the mightiest nation of Europe.

"Truth crushed to earth will rise again."

When once we consider the earnestness for civil and religious liberty, the record of no nation can stand comparison with that of Holland. Some of the English Puritans fled across the Atlantic from persecutions very slight compared with those inflicted upon Dutchmen by Philip, here to found a New England. Those who did not flee remained in old England, fought a few battles, and tried to establish a commonwealth, which in less than fifteen years ended disastrously, because the founders were unfit for government. But these Puritans of Holland, to their everlasting praise be it remembered, battled for their homes, lives, and liberty for eighty years. For four-fifths of a century they faced not only the best and bravest soldiers of Europe, but they faced, along with their wives, their children, and their old folk, the flame, the gibbet, the flood, the siege, the pestilence, the famine, "and all men know, or dream, or fear of agony," all for one thing--to teach the oppressor that his cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children's pride.

But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every horror that ever followed in the train of war, swept over and desolated Holland. And yet, to teach a lesson to oppressors, they endured, they fought, they suffered, they conquered; and when they conquered, the whole world was taught the lesson--worth all the Dutchmen's agony to teach it--that the children of a heavenly Father are born free and equal, and that it is neither the province of nation or church to coerce them into any religious belief or doctrine whatsoever.