ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 1919

BY

JOHN GALSWORTHY

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1919

Copyright, 1919, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Published August, 1919

I AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY

We celebrate to-night the memory of a great man of Letters. What strikes me most about that glorious group of New England writers—Emerson and Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Thoreau, Motley, Holmes, and Lowell—is a certain measure and magnanimity. They were rare men and fine writers, of a temper simple and unafraid.

I confess to thinking more of James Russell Lowell as a critic and master of prose than as a poet. His single-hearted enthusiasm for Letters had a glowing quality which made it a guiding star for the frail barque of culture. His humour, breadth of view, sagacity, and the all-round character of his activities has hardly been equalled in your country. Not so great a thinker or poet as Emerson, not so creative as Hawthorne, so original in philosophy and life as Thoreau, so racy and quaint as Holmes,[2] he ran the gamut of those qualities as none of the others did; and as critic and analyst of literature surpassed them all.

But I cannot hope to add anything of value to American estimate and praise of Lowell—critic, humorist, poet, editor, reformer, man of Letters, man of State affairs. I may, perhaps, be permitted however to remind you of two sayings of his: “I am never lifted up to any peak of vision—but that when I look down in hope to see some valley of the Beautiful Mountains I behold nothing but blackened ruins, and the moans of the down-trodden the world over.... Then it seems as if my heart would break in pouring out one glorious song that should be the Gospel of Reform, full of consolation and strength to the oppressed—that way my madness lies.” That was one side of the youthful Lowell, the generous righter of wrongs, the man. And this other saying: “The English-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided enthusiasts of the plains of Shinar, for as the mixture of many bloods seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers[3] speeches given them a language which is perhaps the noblest vehicle of poetic thought that

ever existed.” That was the other side of Lowell, the enthusiast for Letters; and that the feeling he had about our language.

I am wondering, indeed, Mr. President, what those men who in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries were welding the English language would think if they could visit this hall to-night, if suddenly we saw them sitting here among us in their monkish dress, their homespun, or their bright armour, having come from a greater Land even than America—the Land of the Far Shades. What expression should we see on the dim faces of them, the while they took in the marvellous fact that the instrument of speech they forged in the cottages, courts, cloisters, and castles of their little misty island had become the living speech of half the world, and the second tongue for all the nations of the other half! For even so it is now—this English language, which they made, and Shakespeare crowned, which you speak and we speak, and men speak under the Southern Cross, and unto the Arctic Seas!

[4]

I do not think that you Americans and we English are any longer strikingly alike in physical type or general characteristics, no more than I think there is much resemblance between yourselves and the Australians. Our link is now but community of language—and the infinity which this connotes.

Perfected language—and ours and yours had come to flower before white men began to seek these shores—is so much more than a medium through which to exchange material commodities; it is cement of the spirit, mortar linking the bricks of our thoughts into a single structure of ideals and laws, painted and carved with the rarities of our fancy, the manifold forms of Beauty and Truth. We who speak American and you who speak English are conscious of a community which no differences can take from us. Perhaps the very greatest result of the grim years we have just been passing through is the promotion of our common tongue to the position of the universal language. The importance of the English-speaking peoples is now such that the educated man in every country will perforce, as it were, acquire a[5] knowledge of our speech. The second-language problem, in my judgment, has been solved. Numbers, and geographical and political accident have decided a question which I think will never seriously be reopened, unless madness descends on us and we speakers of English

fight among ourselves. That fate I, at least, cannot see haunting the future.

Lowell says in one of his earlier writings: “We are the furthest from wishing to see what many are so ardently praying for, namely, a National Literature; for the same mighty lyre of the human heart answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime, and any literature in so far as it is national is diseased in so much as it appeals to some climatic peculiarity rather than to universal nature.” That is very true, but good fortune has now made of our English speech a medium of internationality.

Henceforth you and we are the inhabitants and guardians of a great Spirit-City, to which the whole world will make pilgrimage. They will make that pilgrimage primarily because our City is a market-place. It will be for us[6] to see that they who come to trade remain to worship. What is it we seek in this motley of our lives, to what end do we ply the multifarious traffic of civilisation? Is it that we may become rich and satisfy a material caprice ever growing with the opportunity of satisfaction? Is it that we may, of set and conscious purpose, always be getting the better of one another? Is it even, that of no sort of conscious purpose we may pound the roads of life at top speed, and blindly use up our little energies? I cannot think so. Surely, in dim sort we are trying to realise human happiness, trying to reach a far-off goal of health and kindliness and beauty; trying to live so that those qualities which make us human beings—the sense of proportion, the feeling for beauty, pity, and the sense of humour—should be ever more exalted above the habits and passions

that we share with the tiger, the ostrich, and the ape.

And so I would ask what will become of all our reconstruction in these days if it be informed and guided solely by the spirit of the market-place? Do Trade, material prosperity, and the[7] abundance of creature comforts guarantee that we advance towards our real goal? Material comfort in abundance is no bad thing; I confess to a considerable regard for it. But for true progress it is but a flighty consort. I can well see the wreckage from the world-storm completely cleared away, the fields of life ploughed and manured, and yet no wheat grown there which can feed the spirit of man, and help its stature.

Lest we suffer such a disillusion as that, what powers and influence can we exert? There is one at least: The proper and exalted use of this great and splendid instrument, our common language. In a sophisticated world speech is action, words are deeds; we cannot watch our winged words too closely. Let us at least make our language the instrument of Truth; prune it of lies and extravagance, of perversions and all the calculated battery of partizanship; train ourselves to such sobriety of speech, and penmanship, that we come to be trusted at home and abroad; so making our language the medium of honesty and fair-play, that meanness, violence, sentimentality, and self-seeking[8] become strangers in our Lands. Great and evil is the power of the lie, of the violent saying, and the calculated appeal to base or dangerous motive; let us, then, make them fugitives among us, outcast from our speech!

I have often thought during these past years what an ironical eye Providence must have been turning on National Propaganda—on all the disingenuous breath which has been issued to order, and all those miles of patriotic writings dutifully produced in each country, to prove to other countries that they are its inferiors! A very little wind will blow those ephemeral sheets into the limbo of thin air. Already they are decomposing, soon they will be dust. To my thinking there are but two forms of National Propaganda, two sorts of evidence of a country’s worth, which defy the cross-examination of Time: The first and most important is the rectitude and magnanimity of a Country’s conduct; its determination not to take advantage of the weakness of other countries, nor to tolerate tyranny within its own borders. And the other lasting form of Propaganda is the work of the thinker and the artist,[9] of men whose unbidden, unfettered hearts are set on the expression of Truth and Beauty as best they can perceive them. Such Propaganda the old Greeks left behind them, to the

imperishable glory of their Land. By such Propaganda Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch; Dante, St. Francis; Cervantes, Spinoza; Montaigne, Racine; Chaucer, Shakespeare; Goethe, Kant; Turgenev, Tolstoi; Emerson, Lowell—a thousand and one more, have exalted their countries in the sight of all, and advanced the stature of mankind.

You may have noticed in life that when we assure others of our virtue and the extreme rectitude of our conduct, we make on them but a sorry impression. If on the other hand we chance to perform some just act or kindness, of which they hear, or to produce a beautiful work which they can see, we become exalted in their estimation though we did not seek to be. And so it is with Countries. They may proclaim their powers from the housetops—they will but convince the wind; but let their acts be just, their temper humane, the speech and writings of their peoples sober,[10] the work of their thinkers and their artists true and beautiful—and those Countries shall be sought after and esteemed.

We, who possess in common the English language—“best result of the confusion of tongues” Lowell called it—that most superb instrument for the making of word-music, for the telling of the truth, and the expression of the imagination, may well remember this: That, in the use we make of it, in the breadth, justice, and humanity of our thoughts, the vigour, restraint, clarity, and beauty of the setting we give to them, we have our greatest chance to make our Countries lovely and beloved, to further the happiness of mankind, and to keep immortal the priceless comradeship between us.

[11]

II AMERICAN AND BRITON

On the mutual understanding of each other by Americans and Britons, the future happiness of nations depends more than on any other world cause. Ignorance in Central Europe of the nature of American and Englishman tipped the balance in favour of war; and the course of the future will surely be improved by right comprehension of their characters.

Well, I know something at least of the Englishman, who represents four-fifths of the population of the British Isles.

And, first, there exists no more unconsciously deceptive person on the face of the globe. The Englishman does not know himself; outside England he is only guessed at.

Racially the Englishman is so complex and so old a blend that no one can say precisely what he is. In character he is just as complex. Physically, there are two main types; one inclining to length of limb, bony jaws, and narrowness[12] of face and head (you will nowhere see such long and narrow heads as in our island); the other approximating more to the legendary John Bull. The first type is gaining on the second. There is little or no difference in the main mental character behind these two.

In attempting to understand the real nature of the Englishman, certain salient facts must be borne in mind.

The Sea. To be surrounded generation after generation by the sea has developed in him a suppressed idealism, a peculiar impermeability, a turn for adventure, a faculty for wandering, and for being sufficient unto himself in far and awkward surroundings.

The Climate. Whoso weathers for centuries a climate that, though healthy and never extreme, is, perhaps, the least reliable and one of the wettest in the world, must needs grow in himself a counterbalance of dry philosophy, a defiant humour, an enforced medium temperature of soul. The Englishman is no more given to extremes than his climate; and against its damp and perpetual changes he has become coated with a sort of protective bluntness.

[13]

The Political Age of His Country. This is by far the oldest settled Western power politically speaking. For 850 years England has known no serious military incursion from without; for nearly 200 years she has known no serious political turmoil within. This is partly the outcome of her isolation, partly the happy accident of her political constitution, partly the result of the Englishman’s habit of looking before he leaps, which comes, no doubt, from the climate and the mixture of his blood. This political stability has been a tremendous factor in the formation of English character, has given the Englishman of all ranks a certain deep, quiet sense of form and order, an ingrained culture which makes no show, being in the bones of the man as it were.

The Great Preponderance for Several Generations of Town Over Country Life. Taken in conjunction with generations of political stability, this is the main cause of a growing, inarticulate humaneness, of which however the Englishman appears to be rather ashamed.

The other chief factors have been:

The English Public Schools.[14]

The Essential Democracy of the Government.

The Freedom of Speech and the Press (at present rather under a cloud).

The Old-Time Freedom from Compulsory Military Service.

All these, the outcome of the quiet and stable home life of an island people, have helped to make the Englishman a deceptive personality to the outside eye. He has for centuries been licensed to grumble. There is no such confirmed grumbler—until he really has something to grumble at; and then, no one perhaps who grumbles less. An English soldier was sitting in a trench, in the act of lighting his pipe, when a shell burst close by, and lifted him bodily some yards away. He picked himself up, bruised and shaken, and went on lighting his pipe, with the words: “These French matches aren’t ’alf rotten.”

Confirmed carper though the Englishman is at the condition of his country, no one perhaps is so profoundly convinced that it is the best in the world. A stranger might well think from his utterances that he was spoiled[15] by the freedom of his life, unprepared to sacrifice anything for a land in such a condition. If that country be threatened, and with it his liberty, you find that his grumbles have meant less than nothing. You find, too, that behind the apparent slackness of every arrangement and every individual, are powers of adaptability to facts, elasticity, practical genius, a spirit of competition amounting almost to disease, and great determination. Before this war began, it was the fashion among a number of English to lament the decadence of their race. Such lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles. All this democratic grumbling, and habit of “going as you please,” serve a deep purpose. Autocracy, censorship, compulsion destroy the salt in a nation’s blood, and elasticity in its fibre;

they cut at the very mainsprings of a nation’s vitality. Only if reasonably free from control can a man really arrive at what is or is not national necessity and truly identify himself with a national ideal, by simple conviction from within.

Two words of caution to strangers trying to[16] form an estimate of the Englishman: He must not be judged from his Press, which, manned (with certain exceptions) by those who are not typically English, is too hectic to illustrate the true English spirit; nor can he be judged entirely from his literature. The Englishman is essentially inexpressive, unexpressed; and his literary men have been for the most part sports—Nature’s attempt to redress the balance. Further, he must not be judged by the evidence of his wealth. England may be the richest country in the world in proportion to its population, but not ten per cent of that population have any wealth to speak of, certainly not enough to have affected their hardihood; and, with few exceptions, those who have enough wealth are brought up to worship hardihood.

I have never held a whole-hearted brief for the British character. There is a lot of good in it, but much which is repellent. It has a kind of deliberate unattractiveness, setting out on its journey with the words: “Take me or leave me.” One may respect a person of this sort, but it’s difficult either to know or to like[17] him. An American officer said recently to a British Staff Officer in a friendly voice: “So we’re going to clean up Brother Boche together!” and the British Staff Officer replied: “Really!” No wonder Americans sometimes say: “I’ve got no use for those fellows!”

The world is consecrate to strangeness and discovery, and the attitude of mind concreted in that: “Really!” seems unforgivable till one remembers that it is manner rather than matter which divides the hearts of American and Briton.

In your huge, still half-developed country, where every kind of national type and habit comes to run a new thread into the rich tapestry of American life and thought, people must find it almost impossible to conceive the life of a little old island where traditions persist generation after generation without anything to break them up; where blood remains undoctored by new strains; demeanour becomes crystallised for lack of contrasts; and manner gets set like a plaster mask. Nevertheless the English manner of to-day, of what are called the classes, is the growth of only a century or[18] so. There was probably nothing at all like it in the days of Elizabeth or even of Charles II. The English manner was still racy not to say rude when the inhabitants of Virginia, as we are told, sent over to ask that there might be despatched to them some hierarchical assistance for the good of their souls, and were answered: “D——n your souls, grow tobacco!” The English manner of to-day could not even have come into its own when that epitaph of a Lady, quoted somewhere by Gilbert Murray,

was written: “Bland, passionate, and deeply religious, she was second cousin to the Earl of Leitrim; of such are the Kingdom of Heaven.” About that gravestone motto you will admit there was a certain lack of self-consciousness; that element which is now the foremost characteristic of the English manner.

But this English self-consciousness is no mere fluffy gaucherie; it is our special form of what Germans would call “Kultur.” Behind every manifestation of thought or emotion, the Briton retains control of self, and is thinking: “That’s all I’ll let myself feel; at all events all I’ll let myself show.” This stoicism is good[19] in its refusal to be foundered; bad in that it fosters a narrow outlook; starves emotion, spontaneity, and frank sympathy; destroys grace and what one may describe roughly as the lovable side of personality. The English hardly ever say just what comes into their heads. What we call “good form,” the unwritten law which governs certain classes of the Briton, savours of the dull and glacial; but there lurks within it a core of virtue. It has grown up like callous shell round two fine ideals—suppression of the ego lest it trample on the corns of other people; and exaltation of the maxim: ‘Deeds before words.’ Good form, like any other religion, starts well with some ethical truth, but in due time gets commonised,

twisted, and petrified till at last we can hardly trace its origin, and watch with surprise its denial and contradiction of the root idea.