LECT. PAGE
I. WESTMINSTER ABBEY 1
II. THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE 32
III. THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 65
IV. THE SERVANT OF THE LORD 98
V. ANCIENT CIVILISATION 125
LECTURE I.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
Reverence for age, at least so it has long seemed to me, reverence for
age, I say, is a fair test of the vigour of youth; and, conversely,
insolence toward the old and the past, whether in individuals or in
nations, is a sign rather of weakness than of strength. And the cause, I
think, is this. The rich and strong young natures, which feel themselves
capable of original thought and work, have a corresponding respect for
those who, in the generations gone by, have thought and worked as they
hope to do hereafter. And this temper, understand me, so far from being
servile, or even merely conservative, usually accompanies true
independence of spirit. The young athlete, like the young race-horse,
does not despise, but emulate, his sire; even though the old victor be
long past his prime. The young soldier admires the old general; the
young midshipman the old admiral, just in proportion as he himself is
likely to be a daring and able officer hereafter. The son, when grown to
man's estate, may say to his father, I look on you still with all respect
and admiration. I have learnt, and desire always, to learn from you.
But you must be to me now, not a dictator, but an example. You became
what you are by following your own line; and you must let me rival you,
and do you honour, by following mine.
This, I believe, is true of nations as well as of individuals. I do not
hesitate to say that, paradoxical as it may seem, the most original
races--those who have succeeded best and left their stamp most broadly
and permanently on the human race--have also been the most teachable,
provided they were allowed to learn in their own way and to adapt to
their own purposes any higher ancient civilisation with which they came
in contact. What more striking instances of this truth--for truth it
is--than the reverence of the free Republican Greek for the old despotic
civilisation of Egypt? and of the free Norseman, our own ancestor, for
the old and equally despotic civilisation of Rome?
These--the two most originative and most progressive races of Europe--had
a faith in, an awe of, the supposed or real wisdom of the men of old
time, which was often exaggerated into a superstition; but never--thanks
to their own innate force--degenerated into a bondage.
Pardon me this somewhat dry prooemium; and pardon me, too, if it leads me
on to a compliment to the American people, which I trust you will not
think impertinent.
For I have seen, and seen with joy, a like spirit in those Americans whom
it has been my good fortune to meet in my own land. I mean this:--That I
found in them, however self-teaching and self-determining they might be,
that genial reverence for antiquity which I hold to be the sign of a
truly generous--that is in the right sense of the grand old word--a truly
high-bred, nature. I have been touched, and deeply touched, at finding
so many of them, on landing for the first time at Liverpool, hurrying off
to our quaint old city of Chester to gaze on its old girdle of walls and
towers; Roman, Mediaeval, Caroline; its curious 'Rows' of overhanging
houses; its fragments of Roman baths and inscriptions; its modest little
Cathedral; and the--really very few--relics of English history which it
contains. Even two banners of an old Cheshire regiment which had been in
the Peninsular war were almost as interesting, to some, as an illuminated
Bible of the early Middle Age. More than once have I had to repress the
enthusiasm of some charming lady and say, 'But this is nothing. Do not
waste your admiration here. Go on. See the British Museum, its marbles
and its manuscripts--See the French Cathedrals; the ruins of Provence and
Italy; the galleries of Florence, Naples, Rome.'
'Ah, but you must remember,' was the answer, 'these are the first old
things I ever saw.'
A mere sentiment? Yes: but as poets know, and statesmen ought to know,
it is by sentiment, when well directed--as by sorrow, when well used--by
sentiment, I say, great nations live. When sentiment dies out, and mere
prosaic calculation of loss and profit takes its place, then comes a
Byzantine epoch, a Chinese epoch, decrepitude, and slow decay.
And so the eagerness of those generous young souls was to me a good
augury for the future, of them, and of their native land. They seemed to
me--and I say again it touched me, often deeply--to be realising to
themselves their rightful place in the community of the civilised nations
of all lands, and of all times--realising to themselves that they were
indeed
Heirs of all the ages, foremost in the ranks of time;
and minded, therefore, like wise and noble heirs, not to despise and
squander, but to treasure and to use that inheritance, and the
accumulated labours of the mighty dead.
I saw this, I say, at Chester. And therefore I was not surprised to find
the pleasant experience repeated, and to even a higher degree, at
Westminster. A pleasant experience, I say. I know few more agreeable
occupations than showing a party of Americans round our own great Abbey;
and sentimentalising, if you will, in sympathy with them, over England's
Pantheon.
I pause to confess once more that it is almost an impertinence in me to
pay you such a compliment. You have a right to answer me--How could it
be otherwise?--Are we not educated people? Has not our taste been
trained by native authors, who were at least civilised enough to value
the great past, without the need of any European crossing the seas to
tell us of its wealth?
If you reprove me thus, I can but say that the reproof is just, and will
remain just, as long as your poets are what they are; and as long, above
all, as you reverence as much in America as we do in England, the poetry
of Mr. Longfellow. He has not, if I recollect aright, ever employed his
muse in commemorating our great Abbey; but that muse is instinct with all
those lofty and yet tender emotions which the sight of that great Abbey
should call out. He knows, as few know on our side of the wide water,
the effect, chastening and yet ennobling, of such architecture,
consecrated by such associations. He has not only perceived and drank in
all that is purest and noblest in the now sleeping last ten centuries:
but he has combined it, again and again, with that which is purest and
noblest in the waking and yearning present; and combined it organically
and livingly, as leaf and stem combines with flower and fruit. Yes; as
long as the poet who could write both the _Belfry of Bruges_ and _The
Village Blacksmith_ is read among you, there is no need for me to bid you
reverence the past; and little need, I trust, for me to tell those whom I
leave at home to reverence the present. For it is a fact--of which some
Americans may not be as well aware as they should be--that your exquisite
poet has exercised an influence in Britain it may be as great as, and
certainly more varied than, that which he has exercised in his native
land. With us--as, I presume, with you--he has penetrated into thousands
of Puritan homes, and awakened tens of thousands of young hearts to the
beauty and the nobleness of the old pre-Reformation age, and of that
romance and art from which their too exclusive hereditary training had,
until his time, shut them out. And he has thus, truly, done a sacred
deed in turning the hearts of the children to their fathers. That was
enough: but that is not the whole. He has, conversely, turned the hearts
of the fathers to the children. The world-wide humanity of his poems,
and, to be just, of all your American poets who have studied in his
school, has produced throughout Great Britain a just reverence and
affection for the American mind which will have--which has had
already--large social and political results. Be sure, be sure, that in
spite of passing jars, our empire will never be long unjust to yours,
while Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell remain not merely the household
bards--though that is much--but counsellors, comforters, and trusted
friends to hundreds of thousands of gentle and earnest souls; from the
palace to the parsonage, from the little village shop to the farm-house
on the lonely down.
But there is another American author--who was the delight of my own
youth, and who should have been my teacher also, for he was a master of
our common tongue, and his prose is as graceful and felicitous as poor
Elia's own, and it is certainly more manly--another American author, I
say, who, with that high-bred reverence for what is old, has told you
already more about Westminster Abbey, and told it better, than I am
likely to tell it. Need I say that I mean the lamented Washington
Irving? Ah, that our authors had always been as just to you as he was
just to us; and indeed more than just; for in his courtesy and geniality
he saw us somewhat _en beau_, and treated old John Bull too much as the
poet advises us to treat young and fair ladies--
Be to their faults a little blind,
Be to their virtues very kind.
But what a charming book is that old 'Sketch-book.' And what a charming
essay that on our great Abbey, set with such gems of prose as these,--
'The sun was pouring down a yellow autumnal ray into the square of the
cloisters, beaming upon a scanty spot of grass in the centre, and
lighting up an angle of the vaulted passage with a kind of dusty
splendour. From between the arcades, the eye glanced up to a bit of blue
sky, or a passing cloud, and beheld the sun-gilt pinnacles of the Abbey
towering into the azure heaven.'
Or this again, describing the general effect of Henry the Seventh's
unrivalled chapel,--'The very walls are wrought into universal ornament;
encrusted with tracery, and scooped into niches, crowded with the statues
of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labour of the chisel,
to have been robbed of its weight and density; suspended aloft as if by
magic; and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and
airy security of a cobweb.'
'Dusty splendour,' 'airy security,' epithets so unexpected, and yet so
felicitous, as to be seemingly accidental. Such are the tokens of that
highest art, which is--to conceal its own existence. After such speech
as that, what have I to tell you of the great old Abbey?
Yet there are one or two things, I dare to say, which Washington Irving
would have written differently had he visited Westminster, not forty
years ago, but now.
I think, in the first place, that if he visited the great Abbey now, he
would not have noticed that look of dilapidation at which he hints--and
perhaps had a right to hint--some forty years ago. Dilapidation, dirt,
and negligence are as hateful to us now, as to the builder of the newest
house outside. We too, for more than a generation past, have felt, in
common with the rest of England and with all the nations of Northern
Europe, that awakened reverence for Mediaeval Art and Mediaeval History,
which is--for good and for evil--the special social phenomenon of our
times; the natural and, on the whole, useful countercheck to that extreme
of revolutionary feeling which issues--as it did in Paris but three years
ago--in utter hatred and renunciation of the past, and destruction of its
monuments.
To preserve, to restore, and, if not, to copy, as a sort of filial duty,
the buildings which our forefathers have left us, is now held to be the
very mark of cultivation and good taste in Britain. It may be that we
carry it too far; that by a servile and Chinese exactness of imitation we
are crippling what originality of genius may exist among our draughtsmen,
sculptors, architects. But we at least confess thereby that we cannot
invent and create as could our ancestors five hundred years ago; and as
long as that is the case it is more wise in us--as in any people--to
exhaust the signification and power of the past, and to learn all we can
from older schools of art and thought ere we attempt novelties of our own
which, I confess freely, usually issue in the ugly and the ludicrous.
Be that as it may, we of Westminster Abbey have become, like other
Englishmen, repairers and restorers. Had we not so become, the nation
would have demanded an account of us, as guardians of its national
mausoleum, the building of which our illustrious Dean has so well said--
'Of all the characteristics of Westminster Abbey, that which most endears
it to the nation and gives most force to its name--which has, more than
anything else, made it the home of the people of England and the most
venerated fabric of the English Church--is not so much its glory as the
seat of the coronations, or as the sepulchre of the kings; not so much
its school, or its monastery, or its chapter, or its sanctuary, as the
fact that it is the resting-place of famous Englishmen, from every rank
and creed, and every form of genius. It is not only Reims Cathedral and
St. Denys both in one; but it is what the Pantheon was intended to be to
France--what the Valhalla is to Germany--what Santa Croce is to Italy. . .
It is this which inspired the saying of Nelson--Victory or Westminster
Abbey. It is this which has intertwined it with so many eloquent
passages of Macaulay. It is this which gives point to the allusions of
recent Nonconformist statesmen, least inclined to draw illustrations from
ecclesiastical buildings. It is this which gives most promise of
vitality to the whole institution. Kings are no longer buried within its
walls; even the splendour of pageants has ceased to attract. But the
desire to be buried in Westminster Abbey is as strong as ever.
'This sprang, in the first instance, as a natural off-shoot from the
coronations and interments of the kings. Had they, like those of France,
of Spain, of Austria, of Russia--been buried far away in some secluded
spot, or had the English nation stood aloof from the English monarchy, it
might have been otherwise. The sepulchral chapels built by Henry the
Third and Henry the Seventh might have stood alone in their glory. No
meaner dust need ever have mingled with the dust of Plantagenets, Tudors,
Stuarts, and Guelphs. . . . But it has been the peculiar privilege of
the kings of England that neither in life nor in death have they been
parted from their people. As the Council of the Nation and the Courts of
Law have pressed into the Palace of Westminster, and engirdled the very
throne itself, so the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed
into the sepulchre of the kings, and surrounded them as with a guard of
honour after their death. We are sometimes inclined bitterly to contrast
the placid dignity of our recumbent kings, with Chatham gesticulating
from the northern transept, or Pitt from the western door, or Shakspeare
leaning on his column in Poet's Corner, or Wolfe expiring by the chapel
of St. John. But, in fact, they are, in their different ways, keeping
guard over the shrine of our monarchs and our laws; and their very
incongruity and variety become symbols of that harmonious diversity in
unity which pervades our whole commonwealth.'
Honoured by such a trust, we who serve God daily in the great Abbey are
not unmindful of the duty which lies on us to preserve and to restore, to
the best of our power, the general fabric; and to call on government and
on private persons to preserve and restore those monuments, for which
they, not we, are responsible. A stranger will not often enter our Abbey
without finding somewhere or other among its vast arcades, skilled
workmen busy over mosaic, marble, bronze, or 'storied window richly
dight;' and the very cloisters, which to Washington Irving's eye were
'discoloured with damp, crumbling with age, and crusted with a coat of
hoary moss,' are being repaired till that 'rich tracery of the arches,
and that leafy beauty of the roses which adorn the keystones'--of which
he tells--shall be as sharp and bright as they were first, 500 years ago.
One sentiment, again, which was called up in the mind of your charming
essayist, at the sight of Westminster Abbey, I have not felt myself: I
mean its sadness. 'What,' says he, 'is this vast assembly of sepulchres
but a treasury of humiliation? a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the
emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion.'
So does that 'mournful magnificence' of which he speaks, seem to have
weighed on him, that he takes for the motto of his whole essay, that
grand Elizabethan epigram--
When I behold, with deep astonishment,
To famous Westminster how there resort
Living in brasse or stony monument,
The Princes and the worthies of all sort;
Do I not see re-formed nobilitie,
Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation,
And look upon offenseless majestie,
Naked of pomp or earthly domination?
And how a play-game of a painted stone
Contents the quiet, now, and silent sprites,
Whom all the world, which late they stood upon,
Could not content, nor quench their appetites.
Life is a frost of cold felicities;
And death the thaw of all our vanities.
True, true--who knows it not, who has lived fifty years in such a world
as this?--and yet but half the truth.
Were there no after-life, no juster home beyond the grave, where each
good deed--so spake the most august of lips--shall in no wise lose its
reward--is it nought, _virum volitare per ora_, to live upon the lips of
men, and find an immortality, even for a few centuries, in their hearts?
I know what answer healthy souls have made in every age to that question;
and what they will make to the end, as long as the respect of their
fellow-creatures is, as our Creator meant that it should be, precious to
virtuous men. And let none talk of 'the play-game of a painted stone,'
of 'the worthless honours of a bust.' The worth of honour lies in that
same worthlessness. Fair money wage for fair work done, no wise man will
despise. But that is pay, not honour; the very preciousness
whereof--like the old victor's parsley crown in the Greek games--is that
it had no value, gave no pleasure, save that which is imperishable,
spiritual, and not to be represented by gold nor quintessential diamond.
Therefore, to me at least, the Abbey speaks, not of vanity and
disappointment, but of content and peace.