In old maps the line which outlined British possessions in America included the greater part of what is now territory of the United States. The possessions of the American in England are laid down on no map, yet he holds them in memory and imagination by a title such as no conquest ever established and no revolution can ever overthrow. The dust that is sacred to you is sacred to him. The annals which Shakspeare makes walk before us in flesh and blood are his no less than yours. These are the ties which we recognize, and are glad to recognize, on occasions like this. They will be yearly drawn closer as science goes on with her work of abolishing time and space, and thus render more easy that peaceful commerce ’twixt dividable shores which is so potent to clear away whatever is exclusive in nationality or savors of barbarism in patriotism.
I remain, dear Mr. Mayor,
Faithfully yours,
J. R. Lowell.
X.
AT THE DINNER TO AMERICAN AUTHORS.
The dinner of the Incorporated Society of Authors, on July 25, 1888, was given to the “American Men and Women of Letters” who happened to be in London on that date. Mr. Lowell spoke as follows:
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. 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 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. 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. 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.