YOUR SPEECH AND OURS
[Speech of Lord Houghton, in response to William Cullen Bryant, at a breakfast given in his honor at the Century Club, New York, October 17, 1875. William Cullen Bryant, President of the Club, presided, and said in part: "Our guest, Lord Houghton, was not born a lord, but he was born a poet, which I take to be something better. Some forty years ago, I think it was, he wandered in Switzerland, Italy and Greece, and the impressions made upon his mind are woven into his beautiful series of poems published under the title of 'Memorials of Many Scenes.' At a later period, perhaps ten years afterward, he traveled in Egypt and the western coast of Asia, and returned, bringing with him a sheaf of 'Palm-Leaves,' a series of charming poems, inspired by the remarkable places which he visited, and by the incidents of his journey. These 'palm-leaves,' let me say, have a perennial verdure, they are yet as green as when they were gathered and still breathe Sabæan odors—the spicy perfume of the Orient—what the old poet Donne calls 'the almighty balm of the early East.' He is now a traveler in our territory, a region almost without antiquities, but of sufficient interest to attract his steps hither. He will doubtless see faults in our social and political condition—the eyes of a stranger are quicker to discern them than our own can be—but let us hope that he will carry back to his native land the recollections of a cordial reception among our people, such as I hope we are ever ready to accord to personal worth, to genius, and to services rendered to the human race. The only time I ever saw Dr. Bowring, which was some thirty years since, when he was a member of Parliament, of the party called Radical, is memorable with me on account of the eulogy of our guest, which he uttered with much warmth and enthusiasm. He praised the generosity of his sentiments and the largeness of his sympathies. 'At his table,' he added, 'you meet with men of various differing opinions; the only title to his hospitality and esteem is personal merit.' The same rule of preference which he applied to the individuals whom he admitted to his friendship, had governed him throughout a long public life in the measures which he had supported. His co-operation and efficient aid have been given to proceedings and measures which contemplate the well-being of the people—to useful and beneficial reforms. In their favor he steadily gave his vote and raised his voice. In honoring him we, therefore, honor not only the poet, but the philanthropist and the statesman. I propose, therefore, the health of Lord Houghton.">[
Mr. Bryant and Gentlemen:—In finding myself here now for the first time, I am agitated by conflicting emotions, by my pleasure in being among you, and by my regret at not having been here before.
In alluding to my poetic experience, Mr. Bryant mentioned that I had passed many years of my early life in Italy, and while he was so doing there arose in my memory a little incident not inapplicable to my present position. I passed some time at Venice; and one summer evening, on the Piazza di San Marco, my attention was attracted by an old man, who walked up and down with a mingled air of wonder and delight, and who, after I had observed him for some moments, came and asked me in the Venetian dialect what streets he was to take toward a certain remote portion of the city. I said I was a foreigner, and that he, being a native of the place, must know its geography better than I could. He then told me that he was there for the first time. He had passed all his life in his own distinct world, there earning his daily bread, and occupied by its little local interests. At last a friend had told him that he must see the Place and Church of San Marco before he died, and put him in a boat and landed him there, and now he wanted to find his way home, charmed and contented.
Gentlemen, I am in the position of that Venetian veteran, and shall return to my country, happy that I have at last found my way to this great place and habitation—the civitas of English-speaking people. Not that I have ever failed to regard this country in many senses as my own, from the time when I took moral comfort from the flight of Mr. Bryant's "Wild Fowl" across the ocean, and took the best lesson of life from the Psalm of Longfellow. Since then I have ever been with you in all your intellectual progress, and in the necessarily checkered course of your constitutional history, and never more than in the late solemn years, in all the national difficulties which you have so energetically, so persistently, and so humanely surmounted.
In looking back to my impressions of those times, I sometimes think that my sympathy with you was not wholly unselfish, but that I felt that, if I had ever written anything which has a chance of a prolonged existence, I should wish it to be read, not by any distracted and impotent communities of British race, but by America, one and indivisible. And, gentlemen, this is not unnatural, for amid all the divisions or distractions of your history, your literature has ever been patriotic and national. Literature, in truth, has been to you a good and faithful emigrant, reproductive not only of all intellectual growth, but of the sympathies—the largest sympathies—which bind together man to man. It has settled among you every classic writer of British origin, and from the Continent it has brought to you Goethe, Schiller, and Heinrich Heine. It is also noticeable that by the side of these great colonizations of thought you have not refused to receive and to pass to your furthest Territories the humblest addition, the single volume of verse, the chance felicitous expression of combined thought and feeling, even some accidental refrain of song that had pleasantly caught the ear and gone to the heart of man.
And this brings me to say to you one professional word respecting that art and the nature of poetry that you have been kind enough to connect with my name. The greater part of the verses I have written were that product of the lyrical period of youth which is by no means uncommon in modern civilization. It exhibits itself sometimes in the strangest manner, without connection with other culture, or even the most common intellectual opportunities. Of this I happen to have given to the world a signal instance in the volume I published of the poems of David Gray, a Scotch weaver-boy, who, without one advantage beyond the common education of his class, described all the nature within his ken in the highest poetic perfection, and passed away, leaving a most pathetic record of a short life of imaginative sensibility. You can contrast this simple and wayside flower of a faculty with such rich and complete cultivation as it can assume in the efflorescence of Tennyson or Swinburne; but in whatever form you find it, do not the less value the faculty itself. Permit me to say that in no condition of society can it be encouraged and fertilized more usefully than among yourselves. For not only will it bring with it calm and comfort amid all the superabundant activities, ambitions, and confusions of daily life, but it has also the regulative powers teaching men to divide the sphere of the imagination from that of practical life, and thus obviating the dangers that so often arise from the want of this distinction.
There is no better preservative than the exercise of the poetic faculty from religious hallucinations, from political delusions, and I would say even from financial extravagances. Therefore, through the whole vast range of this new world, be on the watch to look out for and to encourage this great gift to man. Do not be too hard with any imperfections or absence of refinement which may accompany its exhibition. Do not treat it too critically or with too much scholastic censure. Recognize also its value on another ground—the extension and the perpetuation of our great common language—an interest not less dear to every one of us here present than to the future welfare of mankind:—
"Beyond the vague Atlantic deep,
Far as the farthest prairies sweep,
Where mountain wastes the sense appall
Where burns the radiant Western Fall,
One duty lies on old and young—
With filial piety to guard,
As on its greenest native sward,
The glory of the English tongue!
"That ample speech, that subtle speech,
Apt for the needs of all in each,
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend
Wherever human feelings tend,
Preserve its force, expand its powers,
And through the maze of civil life,
In letters, commerce, e'en in strife,
Remember, it is yours and ours!"