[Speech of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton at a farewell banquet given to
Charles Dickens, London, November 2, 1867, prior to his departure on a
reading tour in the United States. In giving the toast of the evening,
Lord Lytton, the chairman, delivered the following speech.]
MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I now approach the toast which is
special to the occasion that has brought together a meeting so numerous
and so singularly distinguished. You have paid the customary honors to
our beloved sovereign, due not only to her personal virtues, but to that
principle of constitutional monarchy in which the communities of Europe
recognize the happiest mode of uniting liberty with order, and giving to
the aspirations for the future a definite starting-point in the
experience and the habits of the past. You are now invited to do honor
to a different kind of royalty, which is seldom peacefully acknowledged
until he who wins and adorns it ceases to exist in the body, and is no
longer conscious of the empire which his thoughts bequeath to his name.
Happy is the man who makes clear his title-deeds to the royalty of
genius while he yet lives to enjoy the gratitude and reverence of those
whom he has subjected to his sway. Though it is by conquest that he
achieves his throne, he at least is a conqueror whom the conquered
bless; and the more despotically he enthralls, the dearer he becomes to
the hearts of men.
Seldom, I say, has that kind of royalty been quietly conceded to any man
of genius until his tomb becomes his throne, and yet there is not one of
us now present who thinks it strange that it is granted without a murmur
to the guest whom we receive to-night. It has been said by a Roman poet
that Nature, designing to distinguish the human race from the inferior
animals by that faculty of social progress which makes each combine with
each for the aid and defence of all, gave to men _mollissima
corda_,--hearts the most accessible to sympathy with their fellow kind;
and hence tears,--and permit me to add, and hence laughter,--became the
special and the noblest attributes of humanity. Therefore it is humanity
itself which obeys an irresistible instinct when it renders homage to
one who refines it by tears that never enfeeble, and by a laughter that
never degrades.
You know that we are about to intrust our honored countryman to the
hospitality of those kindred shores in which his writings are as much
"household words" as they are in the homes of England. And if I may
presume to speak as a politician, I should say that no time could be
more happily chosen for his visit; because our American kinsfolk have
conceived, rightly or wrongfully, that they have some cause of complaint
against ourselves, and out of all England we could not have selected an
envoy more calculated to allay irritation and to propitiate good-will.
In the matter of good-will there is a distinction between us English and
the Americans which may for a time operate to our disadvantage; for we
English insist upon claiming all Americans as belonging to our race, and
springing from the same ancestry as ourselves, and hence the idea of any
actual hostility between them and us shocks our sense of relationship;
and yet in reality a large and very active proportion of the American
people derives its origin from other races besides the Anglo-Saxon.
German and Dutch and Celtic forefathers combine to form the giant family
of the United States; but there is one cause forever at work to cement
all these varieties of origin, and to compel the American people, as a
whole, to be proud as we are of their affinity with the English race.
What is that cause? What is that agency? Is it not that of one language
in common between the two nations? It is in the same mother tongue that
their poets must sing, that their philosophers must reason, that their
orators must argue upon truth or contend for power.
I see before me a distinguished guest, distinguished for the manner in
which he has brought together all that is most modern in sentiment with
all that is most scholastic in thought and language; permit me to say,
Mr. Matthew Arnold. I appeal to him if I am not right when I say that it
is by a language in common that all differences of origin sooner or
later we are welded together--that Etruscans, and Sabines, and Oscans,
and Romans, became one family as Latins once, as Italians now? Before
that agency of one language in common have not all differences of
ancestral origin in England between Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans,
melted away; and must not all similar differences equally melt away in
the nurseries of American mothers, extracting the earliest lessons of
their children from our own English Bible, or in the schools of
preceptors who must resort to the same models of language whenever they
bid their pupils rival the prose of Macaulay and Prescott, or emulate
the verse of Tennyson and Longfellow? Now, it seems to me that nothing
can more quicken the sense of that relationship which a language in
common creates, than the presence and voice of a writer equally honored
and beloved in the old world and in the new; and I cannot but think that
where-ever our American kinsfolk welcome that presence, or hang
spell-bound on that voice, they will feel irresistibly how much of
fellowship and unison there is between the hearts of America and
England. So that when our countrymen quits their shores he will leave
behind him many a new friend to the old fatherland which greets them
through him so cordially in the accents of the mother tongue. And in
those accents what a sense of priceless obligations--obligations
personal to him and through him to the land he represents--must steal
over his American audience! How many hours in which pain and sickness
have changed into cheerfulness and mirth beneath the wand of this
enchanter! How many a combatant beaten down in the battle of life--and
nowhere is the battle of life more sharply waged than in the
commonwealth of America--has caught new hope, new courage, new force
from the manly lessons of this unobtrusive teacher!
Gentlemen, it is no wonder that the rising generation of people who have
learned to think and to feel in our language, should eagerly desire to
see face to face the man to whose genius, from their very childhood,
they have turned for warmth and for light as instinctively as young
plants turn to the sun. But I must not forget that it is not I whom you
have come to hear; and all I might say, if I had to vindicate the fame
of our guest from disparagement or cavil, would seem but tedious and
commonplace when addressed to those who know that his career has passed
beyond the ordeal of contemporaneous criticism, and that in the applause
of foreign nations it has found a foretaste of the judgment of
posterity. I feel as if every word that I have already said had too long
delayed the toast which I now propose: "A prosperous voyage, health and
long life, to our illustrious guest and countryman, Charles Dickens."