Now I almost defy anyone to find all these localities in a modern map. You would have, in the first place, to start in the middle of London at the Angel at Islington. Sadlers Wells is now in the midst of a network of streets. It was only when I turned to Northcock’s history of London, which has a good map dated 1772, that all was plain. Islington was a village outside London; Sadlers Wells a suburban resort; Exmouth street was not yet built;[30] but Coppice row, Hockley in the Hole, and of course Saffron Hill and Field Lane, were all easily found.
In speaking of this great delineator of human character as now needing explanation and comment, I have no doubt that he belongs to that small group of writers whose works belong to all ages. We hear complaints in England that young people do not read him; and the same were made when we were young.
But with us, and I believe with you, his popularity from time to time revives, and no educated man or woman can ignore him. The fact that he has appealed so strongly to the imagination of America is alone a proof of the universality of his genius; for, like Shakespeare and the classics of all countries, his works are the property, not of one people, but of the world. He is not perfect; we should not love him so much if he were. He has faults of style, of arrangement, even of taste. It is easy to criticise; but because of his very excellences, his humour, his pathos, his wide sympathy, his hatred of injustice and oppression, it seems almost presumption to endeavour to sing his praises.
May I conclude with those prophetic words he puts into the mouth of Martin Chuzzlewit on leaving your country, which he made his own by denouncing its failings as unsparingly as he did those of his own mother land, in the hope that both you and we, America and England, would conquer them and become the common benefactors of humanity.
“‘I am thinking,’ said Mark, ‘that if I was a painter and was called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?’
‘Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I suppose.’
‘No,’ said Mark, ‘that wouldn’t do for me, sir. I should want to draw it like a Bat for its shortsightedness, like a Bantam for its bragging, like a Magpie for its honesty, like a Peacock for its vanity, like an Ostrich for putting its head in the mud and thinking nobody sees it.’
‘And like a Phœnix for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices and soaring up into the sky.’
‘Well, Mark, let us hope so.’”
APPENDIX TO LECTURE VI