when Herman smote the Romans in the Teutoburger-Wald, and the great Cæsar wailed in vain to his slain general, Varus, give me back my legions! Teach your children that the Congress which sits at Washington is as much the child of Magna Charta as the Parliament which sits at Westminster; and that when you resisted the unjust demands of an English king and council, you did but that which the free commons of England held the right to do, and did, not only after, but before, the temporary tyranny of the Norman kings.
Show them the tombs of English kings; not of those Norman kingsno Norman king lies buried in our Abbeythere is no royal interment between Edward the Confessor, the last English prince of Cerdics house, and Henry the Third, the first of the new English line of kings. Tell them, in justice to our common forefathers, that those men were no tyrants, but kings, who swore to keep, and for the most part did keep, like loyal gentlemen, the ancient English laws, which they had sworn in Westminster Abbey to maintain; and that the few of them who persisted in outraging the rights or the conscience of the free people of England, paid for their perjury with their crowns, or with their lives. And tell them, too, in justice to our common ancestors, that there were never wanting to the kings, the nobles, or the commons of England, since the days when Simon de Montfort organised the House of Commons in Westminster Hall, on the 2nd of May, 1258there were never wanting, I say, to the kings, the nobles, or the commons of England, counsellors who dared speak the truth and defend the right, even at the risk of their own goods and their own lives.
Remind them, tooor let our monuments remind themthat even in the worst times of the War of Independence, there were not wanting, here in England, statesmen who dared to speak out for justice and humanity; and that they were not only confessed to be the leading men of their own day, but the very men whom England delighted to honour by places in her Pantheon. Show them the monuments of Chatham, Pitt, and FoxBurke sleeps in peace elsewhereand remind them that the great earl, who literally died as much in your service as in ours, whose fiery invectives against the cruelties of that old war are, I am proud to say, still common-places for declamation among our English schoolboys, dared, even when all was at the worst, to tell the English House of LordsIf I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my armsnever, never, never!
Yesan American as well as an Englishman may find himself in the old Abbey in right good company.
Yesand I do not hesitate to say, that if you will look through the monuments erected in that Abbey, since those of Pitt and Foxyou will find that the great majority commemorate the children, not of obstruction, but of progress; not of darkness, but of light.
Holland, Tierney, Mackintosh, Grattan, Peel, Canning, Palmerston, Isaac Watts, Bell, Wilberforce, Sharp, the Macaulays, Fowell Buxton, Francis Horner, Charles Buller, Cobden, Watt, Rennell, Telford, Locke, Brunel, Grote, Thackeray, Dickens, Mauricemen who, each in his own way, toiled for freedom of some kind; freedom of race, of laws, of commerce, of locomotion, of production, of speech, of thought, of education, of human charity, and of sympathythese are the men whom England still delights to honour; whose busts around our walls show that the ancient spirit is not dead, and that we, as you, are still, as 1500 years ago, the sons of freedom and of light.
But, beside these statesmen who were just and true to you, and therefore to their native land, there lie men before whose monuments I would ask thoughtful Americans to pauseI mean those of our old fighters, by land and sea. I do not speak merely of those who lived before our Civil Wars, though they are indeed our common heritage. And when you look at the noble monuments of De Vere and Norris, the fathers of the English infantry, you should remember that your ancestors and mine, or that of any other Englishman, may have trailed pike and handled sword side by side under those very men, in those old wars of the Netherlands, which your own great historian, Mr. Motley, has so well described; or have sailed together to Cadiz fight, and to the Spanish Main, with Raleigh or with Drake.
There are those, again, who did their duty two and three generations laterthough one of the noblest of them all, old Admiral Blake, alas! lies we know not wherecast out, with Cromwell and his heroes, by the fanatics and sycophants of the Restorationwhom not only we, but Royalty itself, would now restore, could we recover their noble ashes, to their rightful resting-place.
And these, if not always our common ancestors, were, often enough, our common cousins, as in the case of my own family, in which one brother was settling in New England, to found there a whole new family of Kingsleys while the other brother was fighting in the Parliamentary army, and helping to defeat Charles at Rowton Moor.
But there is another class of warriors tombs, which I ask you, if ever you visit the Abbey, to look on with respect, and let me say, affection too. I mean the men who did their duty, by land and sea, in that long series of wars which, commencing in 1739, ended in 1783, with our recognition of your right and power to be a free and independent people. Of those who fought against you I say nought. But I must speak of those who fought for youwho brought to naught, by sheer hard blows, that family compact of the House of Bourbon, which would have been as dangerous to you upon this side of the ocean as to us upon the other; who smote with a continual stroke the trans-Atlantic power of Spain, till they placed her once vast and rich possessions at your mercy to this day; and whoeven more important stillprevented the French from seizing at last the whole valley of the Mississippi, and girdling your nascent dominion with a hostile frontier, from Louisiana round to the mouth of the St. Lawrence.
When you see Wolfes huge cenotaph, with its curious bronze bas-relief of the taking of the heights of Abraham, think, I pray you, that not only for England, but for you, the little red-haired corporal conquered and died.
Remember, too, that while your ancestors were fighting well by land, and Washington and such as he were learning their lesson at Fort Duquesne and elsewhere better than we could teach them, we were fighting well where we knew how to fightat sea. And when, near to Wolfes monument, or in the Nave, you see such names as Cornwallis, Saumarez, Wager, Vernonthe conqueror of PortobelloLord Aubrey Beauclerk, and so forthbethink you that every French or Spanish ship which these men took, and every convoy they cut off, from Toulon to Carthagena, and from Carthagena to Halifax, made more and more possible the safe severance from England of the very Colonies which you were then helping us to defend. And then agree, like the generous-hearted people which you are, that if, in after years, we sinned against youand how heavy were our sins, I know too wellthere was a time, before those evil days, when we fought for you, and by your side, as the old lion by the young; even though, like the old lion and the young, we began, only too soon, tearing each other to pieces over the division of the prey.
Nay, I will go further, and say this, paradoxical as it may seem:When you enter the North Transept from St. Margarets Churchyard you see on your right hand a huge but not ungraceful naval monument of white marble, inscribed with the names of Bayne, Blair, Lord Robert Mannersthree commanders of Rodneys, in the crowning victory of April 12, 1782fought upon Tropic waters, over which I have sailed, flushed with the thought that my own grandfather was that day on board of Rodneys ship.
Now do you all know what that days great fight meant for you,fought though it was, while you, alas! were still at war with us? It meant this. That that dayfollowed up, six months after, by Lord Howes relief of Gibraltarsettled, I hold, the fate of the New World for many a year. True, in one sense, it was settled already. Cornwallis had already capitulated at York Town. But even then the old lion, disgraced, bleeding, fainting, ready to yieldbut only to you, of his own kin and bloodstruck, though with failing paw, two such tremendous blows at his old enemies, as deprived them thenceforth of any real power in the New World; precipitated that bankruptcy and ruin which issued in the French and Spanish revolutions; and made certain, as I believe, the coming day when the Anglo-Saxon race shall be the real masters of the whole New World.
Of poets and of men of letters I say nought. They are the heritage, neither of us, nor you, but of the human race. The mere man of letters may well sleep in the very centre of that busy civilisation from which he drew his inspiration: but not the poetnot, at least, the poet of these days. He goes not to the town, but nature, for his inspirations, and to nature when he dies he should return. Such menartificial, and town-bredhowever brilliant, or even grand at timesas Davenant, Dryden, Cowley, Congreve, Prior, Gaysleep fitly in our care here. Yet even Popethough one of such in style and heartpreferred the parish church of the then rural Twickenham, and Gray the lonely graveyard of Stoke Pogis. Ben Jonson has a right to lie with us. He was a townsman to the very heart, and a court-poet too. But Chaucer, Spenser, Draytonsuch are, to my mind, out of place. Chaucer lies here, because he lived hard by. Spenser through bitter need and woe. But I should have rather buried Chaucer in some trim garden, Spenser beneath the forest aisles, and Drayton by some silver streameach mans dust resting where his heart was set. Happier, it seems to me, are those who like Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Southey, Scott and Burns, lie far away, in scenes they knew and loved; fulfilling Burkes wise choice: After all I had sooner sleep in the southern corner of a country churchyard than in the tomb of all the Capulets.
Yesthese worthies, one and all, are a token that the Great Abbey, and all its memories of 800 years, does not belong to us alone, nor even to the British Empire alone and all its Colonies, but to America likewise! That when an American enters beneath that mighty shade, he treads on common and ancestral ground, as sacred to him as it is to us; the symbol of common descent, common development, common speech, common creed, common laws, common literature, common national interests, and I trust, of a common respect and affection, such as the wise can only feel toward the wise, and the strong toward the strong.
Is all this sentiment? Remember what I said just now: by well-used sentiment, and well-used sorrow, great nations live.
LECTURE II
THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE
What the Stage is now, I presume, all know. I am not myself a playgoer, but I am informed that, in Europe at least, it is not in a state to arouse any deep interest or respect in any cultivated or virtuous person. Meanwhile, keeping fast to my intention of talking to you only about things worthy of your interest and respect, because they are good, true, and beautiful, I wish to tell you what the Stage was once, in a republic of the pastwhat it may be again, I sometimes dream, in some republic of the future.
Let me take you back in fancy some 2314 years440 years before the Christian era, and try to sketch for youalas! how clumsilya great, though tiny people, in one of their greatest momentsin one of the greatest moments, it may be, of the human race. For surely it is a great and a rare moment for humanity, when all that is loftiest in itwhen reverence for the Unseen powers, reverence for the heroic dead, reverence for the father-land; and that reverence, too, for self, which is expressed in stateliness and self-restraint, in grace and courtesy; when all these, I say, can lend themselves, even for a day, to the richest enjoyment of lifeto the enjoyment of beauty in form and sound, and of relaxation, not brutalizing, but ennobling.
Rare, alas! have such seasons been in the history of poor humanity. But when they have come, they have lifted it up one stage higher thenceforth. Men, having been such once, may become such again; and the work which such times have left behind them becomes immortal.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
Let me take you to the then still unfinished theatre of Athens, hewn out of the limestone rock on the south-east slope of the Acropolis.
Above are the new marble buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athené Promachos, fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and colonnades. In front, and far below, gleams the blue sea, and Salamis beyond.
And there are gathered the people of Athens50,000 of them, possibly, when the theatre was complete and full. If it be fine, they all wear garlands on their heads. If the sun be too hot, they wear wide-brimmed straw hats. And if a storm comes on, they will take refuge in the porticos beneath; not without wine and cakes, for what they have come to see will last for many an hour, and they intend to feast their eyes and ears from sunrise to sunset. On the highest seats are slaves and freedmen, below them the free citizens; and on the lowest seats of all are the dignitaries of the republicthe priests, the magistrates, and the other χαλο χγαθοthe fair and good menas the citizens of the highest rank were called, and with them foreign ambassadors and distinguished strangers. What an audiencethe rapidest, subtlest, wittiest, down to the very cobblers and tinkers, the world has ever seen. And what noble figures on those front seats; Pericles, with Aspasia beside him, and all his friendsAnaxagoras the sage, Phidias the sculptor, and many another immortal artist; and somewhere among the free citizens, perhaps beside his father Sophroniscus the sculptor, a short, square, pugnosed boy of ten years old, looking at it all with strange eyeswho will be one day, so said the Pythoness at Delphi, the wisest man in Greecesage, metaphysician, humourist, warrior, patriot, martyrfor his name is Socrates.
All are in their dresses of office; for this is not merely a day of amusement, but of religious ceremony; sacred to DionysosBacchus, the inspiring god, who raises men above themselves, for goodor for evil.
The evil, or at least the mere animal aspect of that inspiration, was to be seen in forms grotesque and sensuous enough in those very festivals, when the gayer and coarser part of the population, in town and country, broke out into frantic masquerade, of which that silly carnival of Rome is perhaps the last paltry and unmeaning relic. When, as the learned O. Müller says, the desire of escaping from self into something new and strange, of living in an imaginary world, broke forth in a thousand ways; not merely in revelry and solemn, though fantastic songs, but in a hundred disguises, imitating the subordinate beingssatyrs, pans, and nymphs, by whom the god was surrounded, and through whom life seemed to pass from him into vegetation, and branch off into a variety of beautiful or grotesque formsbeings who were ever present to the fancy of the Greeks, as a convenient step by which they could approach more nearly to the presence of the Divinity. But even out of that seemingly bare chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes madbut with a subtle method in its madness.