[Speech of Hamilton W. Mabie at the ninety-first annual dinner of the
New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1896. Henry
E. Howland, vice-President of the Society, presided and introduced the
speaker as follows: "There is no person better qualified to speak upon
any literary subject than the editor of a great paper. He scans the
whole horizon of literature, and his motto is: 'Where the bee sups
there sup I.' As a gentleman eminently fitted to speak upon the
literature of New England or any kindred subject, I have the pleasure
of introducing to you Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, of 'The Outlook.'"]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--When one has the army and navy
behind him, he is impelled to be brief. And when one has a subject which
needs no interpreter, when one has a theme the very recital of the
details of which recalls the most splendid chapter in our intellectual
history, one feels that any words would be impertinent. We are indebted
to New England, in the first place, for giving us a literature. I know
it has been questioned in Congress, why anybody should want a
literature; but if the spiritual rank of a people is to be determined by
depth and richness of life, and if the register of this life of a people
is its art, and especially its art in books, then no country is
reputable among the nobler countries unless it has produced a
literature; and we are, therefore, indebted to New England for
literature. Not the greatest we shall produce, but a literature
continuous from the first settlement of the colonies. It is a very
significant fact that the three men before the Revolution whom we may
call literary men were men born in New England--Benjamin Franklin, who
is too well known to all of you for comment; John Woolman, of whose work
Charles Lamb said: "Woolman's writings should be learned by heart;" and
that great theologian, who wrote in a stately style, Jonathan Edwards.
After the Revolution I have but to call the roll of those names which
are the glory of New England--Hawthorne, the man of finest literary gift
who has yet appeared upon this continent; Longfellow, with his tender
touch; Holmes, with his three o'clock wit, as some one has called it,
the man who was always awake; Lowell, with his rich culture and his
passionate loyalty to all that was best in life and art; and the
historians of the country, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, and Francis
Parkman, with his splendid record of patient and tireless energy. And
then we have the New England writers of the second generation in Edmund
Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Charles Dudley Warner, John Fiske, and Henry James; and we have also a
third generation.
The most striking characteristic of the older, as of the younger, New
England literature is its deep and beautiful humanism, the closeness of
its touch upon experience, the warmth of its sympathy with men and women
in contact with the great movement of life. Growing out of such a soil,
it could hardly have been otherwise, for New England represents, not an
abstraction, but a commanding faith in personality, the clear
self-realization of a man whose obligation goes straight to God, and to
whom God's word travels like an arrow's flight. In one form or another,
all the New England writers deal with this theme; they are concerned,
not with abstractions, but with the hopes and fears and temptations of
man. Hawthorne is absorbed in the problem of the return of a man's deed,
or of his ancestors' deed upon himself; Lowell cares supremely for
nobility and freedom of impulse, act and deed; Whittier for truth and
spiritual fellowship; Emerson, for the reality of spiritual force and
meaning in common duties and ordinary relations; Longfellow, for the
tenderness and purity of childhood, the sweetness and fragrance of
family relations, the charm of historic association; Holmes, for the
endless paradox and surprise which are in human thought and conduct;
Brooks, for the abundance of man's life and the fulness of its spiritual
possibilities; Curtis, for a public life at once pure, free, rich and
stable. For all these writers organization and institutions had great
interest, but they cared primarily for the men whose history these
institutions represent. The quays at Geneva are massive and shine at
night like a constellation; but our interest centres in the river which
rushes between them from the Alps to the sea. This is a democratic note,
but there is another quite as distinct and characteristic--the note of
buoyant cheerfulness, faith in God and man.
There is a ringing tone in the literature of New England which is not
only a protest against any form of oppression, but a challenge to fate.
That courage came from faith in the divine order of life. And that
buoyant courage and cheerfulness were possible because these writers
kept life and art in harmony. There was no schism between ideal and
action in them. They not only followed the vision in spirit; they lived
in the light of it. They illustrated that unity of life without which
there is no God. They kept in the way of growth and truth and
inspiration because they lived wisely. We do not half value their
splendid sanity. A manly and noble moral health was theirs. They rang
true to every moral appeal. They were not only men of letters, but they
were also gentlemen, and they have associated literature in the thought
of the country with dignity, culture and beauty of life--Emerson's
unworldliness, Lowell's loyalty to truth, and Curtis's splendid
rectitude, as enduring as the granite, are of lasting value to the
higher life of the nation.
Their courage and buoyancy were of higher value than we yet understand.
Faith is absolutely essential in a great democratic society. When we
cease to believe in God we cease to believe in man, and when our faith
in man goes, democracy becomes a vast, irrational engine of tyranny and
corruption. In the last analysis democracy rests in the belief that
there is something of the divine in every man, and that through every
life there shines a glimpse of the eternal order. For Government rests,
not in the will of the majority, but on the will of God; and democracy
is but a vaster surface upon which to discover the play of that will. It
follows from these characteristics that the real significance of the New
England writers lies not in what they did, but in what they
unconsciously predicted. Clear and ringing as are the notes they struck,
these notes are prelusive; they suggest the great _motifs_, but they do
not completely unfold them; they could not, for the time was not yet
ripe; they announced the principle of individuality, and they sang the
great idea of nationality; but the depth and richness of national life
was not theirs to express. That vast life rises more and more into the
national consciousness, but its Homer or Dante or Shakespeare has not
appeared--probably cannot appear for a long time to come. That life is
too wide and still too inharmonious for clear expression. Its very
richness postpones the day of its ultimate expression; but when the hour
is ripe it will embody an ideal as significant as any in history, with
illustration more varied and vital. We are still the victims of our
continent; we shall one day be its masters.
One of the oldest drawings in the world is on the side of a cave in
France, and represents a man fleeing naked and defenceless from a great
serpent--man still in bondage to material conditions. One of the most
stirring of modern scenes is that in which Siegfried waits at the mouth
of the cavern--leaves rustling, light shimmering, birds singing about
him. The glory of youth is on him and the beauty of the world about him;
but he cannot understand what the sounds mean. Then comes the struggle,
the victory, the revelation of song and light; and the hero passes
swiftly up the heights, where, encircled with flame, sleeps the soul of
his strength. In some other day, when the continent is tamed and we have
struck to the heart that materialism which is our only real foe, we,
too, shall climb the heights of achievement, and we shall stand face to
face with that ideal which is now so dim and remote. Then comes the poet
of the real new world--the world of opportunity, of sacrifice, of
unselfish freedom of the larger art and diviner life. And when that day
comes and the great poet sings and the great writer speaks, we shall
hear faint and far the sounds of those old voices of New England; not so
vast as the later music, but as pure and harmonious and true. We shall
understand how they made the later music possible; how they have made
possible the fulfilment of the prediction of one of their own number:
between Shakespeare in the cradle and Shakespeare in "Hamlet" there was
needed but an interval of time, and the same sublime condition is all
that lies between the America of toil and the America of art.
[Applause.]