Текст книги "With Americans of Past and Present Days"
Автор книги: Jean Jules Jusserand
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Tous ces fléaux célestes,
Ces ravageurs d'États dont les pieds triomphants
Sur les pères broyés écrasent les enfants,
Grâce à toi, désormais, pâliront dans l'histoire....
L'humanité te doit l'esclavage aboli....
L'Amérique sa force et la paix revenue,
L'Europe un idéal de grandeur inconnue,
Et l'avenir mettra ton image et ton nom
Plus haut que les Césars—auprès de Washington.
When, in a log cabin of Kentucky, over a century ago, that child was born who was named after his grandfather killed by the Indians, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon I swayed Europe, Jefferson was President of the United States, and the second War of Independence had not yet come to pass. It seems all very remote. But the memory of the great man to whom these lines are dedicated is as fresh in everybody's mind as if he had only just left us; more people, indeed, know of him now than was the case in his own day. "It is," says Plutarch, "the fortune of all good men that their virtue rises in glory after their death, and that the envy which any evil man may have conceived against them never survives the envious." Such was the fate of Lincoln.
FOOTNOTES
[227] Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, vol. XIII, col. 33 ff., November 2 and 3, 1803. Senator White had also objected that the price, of fifteen million dollars, was too high; while the French plenipotentiary, Barbé-Marbois, had observed that the lands still unoccupied, to be handed to the American Government "would have a value of several billions before a century had elapsed," in which he was no bad prophet. Marbois added: "Those who knew the importance of a perfect understanding between these two countries attached more value to the twenty million francs set apart for the American claims than to the sixty offered to France." In accordance again with Senator White, the deciding motive had not been that longing for "a perfect understanding" mentioned by Marbois, but a feeling that Louisiana would, at the next war, "inevitably fall into the hands of the British." "Of course, it would," future Marshal Berthier, who was averse to the cession, had observed when the point had been mentioned at the council held at the Tuileries, before the First Consul Bonaparte, on Easter Day, 1803, "but Hanover would just as soon be in our hands, and an exchange would take place at the peace.... Remember this: no navy without colonies; no colonies without a navy." Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane, Paris, 1829, pp. 295, 315, 330.
[228] May 10, 1786.
[229] September 9, 1786.
[230] July 8, 1783.
[231] "Short Autobiography, written at the request of a friend," Complete Works, ed. Nicolay and Hay, 1905, pp. 26, 27.
[232] Ibid., 28, 29.
[233] Some French settlements were still in existence in the region, and were still French. "The French settlements about Kaskaskia retained much of their national character, and the pioneers from the South who visited them or settled among them never ceased to wonder at their gayety, their peaceable industry, and their domestic affection, which they did not care to dissemble and conceal like their shy and reticent neighbors. It was a daily spectacle which never lost its strangeness for the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians to see the Frenchman returning from his work greeted by his wife and children with embraces of welcome 'at the gate of his dooryard, and in view of all the villagers.' The natural and kindly fraternization of the Frenchmen with the Indians was also a cause of wonder." Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, 1904, I, 58.
[234] February 22, 1861.
[235] L'Amérique devant l'Europe, Paris, 1862; conclusion.
[236] Washington, August, 4, 1862.
[237] "L'esprit Gaulois, toujours moqueur, avait saisi le côté plaisant de cet inutile étalage d'épaulettes et de tambours, et les officiers du 55º New York qui, à l'heure du danger, prodiguèrent pour leur nouvelle patrie le sang français sous la direction d'un chef habile et vaillant, M. de Trobriand, s'étaient donnés à eux-mêmes, dans l'un des repas de corps qui terminent toujours ces cérémonies, le titre joyeux de 'Gardes La fourchette.'" Comte de Paris, Histoire de la Guerre civile en Amérique, 1874, I, 311.
[238] Quatre ans de campagnes à l'armée du Potomac, par Régis de Trobriand, ex-Major Général au service volontaire des Etats Unis d'Amérique, Paris, 1867, 2 vols. As is well known, two French princes took part in the war as staff-officers in the Army of the Potomac, the Comte de Paris and the Duc de Chartres. An American officer who was present told me that, whether on foot or on horseback, the Comte de Paris had the habit of stooping. During a severe engagement he was asked to carry an order across an open field, quite exposed to the enemy's fire. He took the order, straightened on his saddle, crossed the field quite erect, fulfilled his mission, recrossed the field, keeping perfectly straight, and when back in the lines, stooped again.
[239] Quatre ans de campagnes, I, 131.
[240] Abraham Lincoln, by Alphonse Jouault. The work was begun in Washington at the time of Lincoln's assassination, which the author witnessed, but printed only in 1875. The text of the second inaugural address had been read in France with great admiration. The famous bishop of Orleans, Dupanloup, wrote concerning it to Augustin Cochin: "Mr. Lincoln expresses with solemn and touching gravity the feelings which, I am sure, pervade superior souls in the North as in the South.... I thank you for having made me read this beautiful page of the history of great men, and I beg you to tell Mr. Bigelow of my sympathetic sentiments. I would hold it an honor if he were so good as to convey an expression of them to Mr. Lincoln." Orleans, April 2, 1865; an appendix to Montalembert's Victoire du Nord, Paris, 1865.
[241] April 28, 1865. Text as well as that of the documents just quoted in The Assassination of President Lincoln. Appendix to Diplomatic Correspondence of 1865, Government Printing Office, 1866.
[242] "Dédié par la Démocratie Française à Lincoln, Président deux fois élu des Etats Unis—Lincoln, honnête homme, abolit l'esclavage, rétablit l'union, sauva la République, sans voiler la statue de la liberté." The medal is now the property of the President's son, Mr. Robert T. Lincoln.
[243] A very long article by L. de Gaillard, April 30, 1868.
[244] La Victoire du Nord, Paris, 1865, pp. 7, 11, 20, 23.
[245] In the Avenir National, May 3, 1865.
[246] April 29, 1865.
[247] Abraham Lincoln, sa naissance, sa vie, sa mort, par Achille Arnaud, Rédacteur à "l'Opinion Nationale." Paris, 1865, p. 96.
[248] Bibliothèque Libérale—Abraham Lincoln, by Augustin Cochin, Paris, 1869.
V
THE FRANKLIN MEDAL
PHILADELPHIA, APRIL 20, 1906
THE FRANKLIN MEDAL
On the occasion of the second centennial of Franklin's birth, a solemn celebration, lasting several days, was held in Philadelphia, under the auspices of the American Philosophical Society, founded by himself more than a century and a half before.
Many Americans of fame took part in the celebration, such men as the Secretary of State Elihu Root, Senator Lodge, Horace H. Furness, former Ambassador Joseph Choate, the President (not yet emeritus) of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, Doctor Weir Mitchell, and many others. Several foreign nations were represented; England notably by one of her sons who has succeeded in the difficult task of adding lustre to the name he bears, Sir George Darwin.
In accordance with a law passed by Congress two years before, a commemorative medal was, on that occasion, offered to France. The speech of acceptance is here reproduced solely to have a pretext for reprinting the generous and memorable address of presentation by the then Secretary of State, Mr. Elihu Root; and also in order to help in better preserving the souvenir of a more than graceful act of the United States toward France.
Speech by the Secretary of State Presenting the Medal
Excellency: On the 27th of April, 1904, the Congress of the United States provided by statute that the Secretary of State should cause to be struck a medal to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, and that one single impression on gold should be presented, under the direction of the President of the United States, to the Republic of France.
Under the direction of the President I now execute this law by delivering the medal to you as the representative of the Republic of France. This medal is the work of fraternal collaboration by two artists whose citizenship Americans prize highly, Louis and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The name indicates that they may have inherited some of the fine artistic sense which makes France pre-eminent in the exquisite art of the medallist.
On one side of the medal you will find the wise, benign, and spirited face of Franklin. On the other side literature, science, and philosophy attend, while history makes her record. The material of the medal is American gold, as was Franklin.
For itself this would be but a small dividend upon the investments which the ardent Beaumarchais made for the mythical firm of Hortalez and Company. It would be but scanty interest on the never-ending loans yielded by the steady friendship of de Vergennes to the distressed appeals of Franklin. It is not appreciable even as a gift when one recalls what Lafayette, Rochambeau, de Grasse, and their gallant comrades were to us, and what they did for us; when one sees in historical perspective the great share of France in securing American independence, looming always larger from our own point of view, in comparison with what we did for ourselves.
But take it for your country as a token that with all the changing manners of the passing years, with all the vast and welcome influx of new citizens from all the countries of the earth, Americans have not forgotten their fathers and their fathers' friends.
Know by it that we have in America a sentiment for France; and a sentiment, enduring among a people, is a great and substantial fact to be reckoned with.
We feel a little closer to you of France because of what you were to Franklin. Before the resplendence and charm of your country's history —when all the world does homage to your literature, your art, your exact science, your philosophic thought—we smile with pleasure, for we feel, if we do not say: "Yes, these are old friends of ours; they were very fond of our Ben Franklin and he of them."
Made more appreciative, perhaps, by what France did for us when this old philosopher came to you, a stranger, bearing the burdens of our early poverty and distress, we feel that the enormous value of France to civilization should lead every lover of mankind, in whatever land, earnestly to desire the peace, the prosperity, the permanence, and the unchecked development of your national life.
We, at least, can not feel otherwise; for what you were to Franklin we would be—we are—to you: always true and loyal friends.
The French Ambassador's Answer
On behalf of the French Republic, with feelings of gratitude, I receive the gift offered to my country, this masterful portrait of Franklin, which a law of Congress ordered to be made, and which is signed with the name, twice famous, of Saint-Gaudens.
Everything in such a present powerfully appeals to a French heart. It represents a man ever venerated and admired in my country—the scientist, the philosopher, the inventor, the leader of men, the one who gave to France her first notion of what true Americans really were. "When you were in France," Chastellux wrote to Franklin, "there was no need to praise the Americans. We had only to say: Look; here is their representative."
The gift is offered in this town of Philadelphia where there exists a hall the very name of which is dear to every American and every French heart—the Hall of Independence—and at a gathering of a society founded "for promoting useful knowledge," which has remained true to its principle, worthy of its founder, and which numbers many whose fame is equally great on both sides of the ocean.
I receive it at the hands of one of the best servants of the state which this country ever produced, no less admired at the head of her diplomacy now than he was lately at the head of her army, one of those rare men who prove the right man, whatever be the place. You have listened to his words, and you will agree with me when I say that I shall have two golden gifts to forward to my government: the medal and Secretary Root's speech.
The work of art offered by America to France will be sent to Paris to be harbored in that unique museum, her Museum of Medals, where her history is, so to say, written in gold and bronze, from the fifteenth century up to now, without any ruler, any great event, being omitted. Some of the American past is also written there—that period so glorious when French and American history were the same history, when first rose a nation that has never since ceased to rise.
There, awaiting your gift, are preserved medals struck in France at the very time of the events, in honor of Washington, to commemorate the relief of Boston in 1776; a medal of John Paul Jones in honor of his naval campaign of 1779; another medal representing G. Washington, and one representing General Howard, to commemorate the battle of Cowpens in 1781; one to celebrate the peace of 1783 and the freedom of the thirteen States; one of Lafayette; one of Suffren, who fought so valiantly on distant seas for the same cause as Washington; one, lastly, of Franklin himself, dated 1784, bearing the famous inscription composed in honor of the great man by Turgot: "Eripuit cælo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis."[249]
My earnest hope is that one of the next medals to be struck and added to the series will be one to commemorate the resurrection of that great city which now, at this present hour, agonizes by the shores of the Pacific. The disaster of San Francisco has awakened a feeling of deepest grief in every French heart, and a feeling of admiration, too, for the manliness displayed by the population during this awful trial. So that what will be commemorated will not be only the American nation's sorrow, but her unfailing heroism and energy.
Now your gift will be added to the collection in Paris; it will be there in its proper place. The thousands who visit this museum will be reminded by it that the ties happily formed long ago are neither broken nor distended, and they will contemplate with a veneration equal to that of their ancestors the features of one whom Mirabeau justly called one of the heroes of mankind.
The Franklin ceremony had occurred at the time of the San Francisco catastrophe, at a moment when, communication having been cut, anxiety was intense.
I had spoken without instructions, but the French Government took their representative's words to the letter. The medal was ordered, and was for Bottée, the artist, a former recipient of the "Grand Prix de Rome," a work of love. It shows on one side the city rising from its ruins, surrounded with emblems of recovered youth and prosperity. On the other side the image of the French Republic is seen offering from over the sea a twig of laurel to America.
One single copy in gold was struck, and the presentation took place in rebuilt San Francisco, in 1909, the medal being received by the statesman and poet, the translator of the sonnets of Heredia, Edward Robeson Taylor, then mayor of the city.
FOOTNOTES
[249] An official note informed the Secretary of State, in the following December, of the arrangements made by the French Republic for the preservation, among proper surroundings, of the Franklin medal: "In the centre of the Hall of Honor in the Museum of Medals at the Paris Mint, stand four ancient show-cases of the time of Louis XVI. One of these has been selected for the Franklin medal, which has been surrounded with the medals herein below enumerated, which were deemed the fittest to make up a worthy retinue, if the phrase be permissible." There follows a description of sixteen medals commemorative of Franco-American history, placed in the same case. "House of Representatives," 59th Congress, 2d session, Document No. 416.
VI
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE NAME OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
PHILADELPHIA, JANUARY 17, 1913
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS
We meet on a solemn occasion.
One has recently disappeared from our midst whose work was a model; whose life, too, was a model; whose benign influence, exerted for many years from the seclusion of a quiet retreat, was felt far beyond the limits of his own country; whose views, always expressed in the gentlest terms, will outlive the thunder of many a noisy writer, as ever-renewing flowers survive earthquakes.
A member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in his own city by Franklin "to promote useful knowledge," Furness was true to the motto of the society and lived the life of a true philosopher. I call him Furness, without Doctor or any other title, not because he is no more, but to obey a request of his. "I do not like titles in the republic of letters," he wrote me in the early times of our acquaintance; "if you will drop all to me, I will do the same to you. One touch of Shakespeare makes the whole world kin."
All those whom the spirit of philosophy has penetrated and who stanchly adhere to its ideal count among the noblest types of humanity and, whatever their rank in life or the period when they lived, resemble each other. When Furness died numerous eulogies, biographies, and portraits of him, penned, many of them, by the hands of masters, were published. I wonder if any better resembled him than this one:
"Remember his constancy in the fulfilling of the dictates of reason, the evenness of his humor at all junctures, the serenity of his face, his extreme gentleness, his scorn for vainglory, his application to penetrate the meaning of things. He never dismissed any point without having first well examined and well understood it. He bore unjust reproaches without acrimony. He did nothing with undue haste.... A foe to slander, he was neither hypercritical, nor suspicious, nor sophistical. He was pleased with little, modest in his house, his clothing, his food. He loved work, ate soberly, and thus was able to busy himself, for the whole day, with the same problems. Let us remember how constant and equable was his friendship, with what open mind he accepted a frank contradiction of his own views, with what joy he received advice that proved better than his own, and the kind of piety, free from all superstition, that was his. Do as he did, and your last hour will be comforted, as his was, by the conscience of the good accomplished."
In those higher regions where true philosophers live, equality reigns; they resemble each other by their virtues; this portrait, which, to my mind, gives such a vivid idea of the life Furness led at Wallingford, near Philadelphia, was drawn eighteen centuries ago, by that noblest of antique minds, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, describing his predecessor, the first of the Antonines, he who, on the last night of his life, being asked for the password, had answered: "Æquanimitas."
After studies at Harvard and Philadelphia and a visit to Europe and the Levant, having taken such part in the Civil War as his infirmity allowed him, a happy husband, a happy father, Horace Howard Furness decided to devote his life to the "promotion of useful knowledge." He withdrew, in a way, from the world, settling in a quiet retreat, and started on his life's work with the equipment of a modern scientist and the silent enthusiasm, the indefatigable energy of mediæval thinkers, the compilers of Summæ of times gone, regretting nothing, happy with his lot, at one with that master mind of old English literature, the author of Piers Plowman. "For," said centuries ago the man "robed in russet,"
"If heaven be on this erthe · and ese to any soule,
It is in cloistre or in scole · be many skilles I finde;
For in cloistre cometh no man · to chide ne to fihte,
But all is buxomnesse there and bokes · to rede and to lerne."
Such a cloister, with ease to his soul, with buxomness, with books to read and learn, was for our departed friend his house in Wallingford, where he lived surrounded by that extraordinarily gifted family of his: a wife to whom we owe the Concordance to the poems of Shakespeare, a sister who translated for him the German critics, sons and a daughter and a sister's relative[250] who have all made their mark in their country's literature. There, for years, he toiled, never thinking of self nor of fame, busy with his task, and even in his seclusion, with his tenderness of heart and ample sympathies, listening to
The still sad music of humanity.
What that task was all the world now knows. A passionate admirer of Shakespeare, he wanted to make accessible to all every criticism, information, comment, explanation concerning the poet which had appeared anywhere at any time. Each volume was to be a complete encyclopædia of all that concerned each play. The first appeared in 1871, the sixteenth is the last he will have put his hand to.
In the introduction to each volume, his purposes and methods are explained, and never has any writer more completely and more unwittingly allowed us to look into his own character than Furness when writing what he must have considered his very impersonal statements. What strikes the reader, before all, is the philosophical spirit which pervades the whole work. A worthy member of the American Philosophical Society, he wanted to be "useful." Lives are and will be more and more encumbered; the acquisition of knowledge should, therefore, be made more and more easy of reach. "To abridge the labor and to save the time of others" was, said he in his first volume, what impelled him to write. No pains of his were spared to lessen those of others. And all specialists know the extraordinary reliability of his texts and statements. "Nowhere, perhaps," Sir Sidney Lee wrote in his Life of Shakespeare, "has more labor been devoted to the study of the works of the poet than that given by Mr. H.H. Furness, of Philadelphia, to the preparation of the new Variorum edition."
The labor was one of love, and a lover naturally forgets himself for the beloved one. Furness tried not to show the ardor of his sentiments; but it now and then appears, usually in small details when he would, more naturally, be off his guard. Shakespeare calls Cæsar's Ambassador Thidias, and not Thyreus, as the later-day editors do, under pretense that it was the real name. They are wrong: "Shakespeare in his nomenclature was, as in all things, exquisite.... For certain reasons (did he ever do anything without reason?) he chose the name of Thidias...."
In the privacy of intimate correspondence Furness would be more outspoken, being not restrained by the thought that he would be imposing his own views upon the mass of readers. On Cleopatra, about whom I had risked opinions somewhat different from his, he wrote me—it seems it was yesterday: "Of course, Shakespeare's Cleopatra is not history. But who cares for history? Of this be assured, that, if you had lived with her as I have for two years, you would adore her as deeply as I do."
The truth is that, as he said, he actually lived with the personages of the plays, and he rapturously listened to those far-off voices, which came clearer to his infirm ears than to those of any one of us, meant only for commonplace uses. He had a better right than any to form an opinion, but was ever afraid to seem to force it on others. Of his edition itself he had written: "I do not flatter myself that this is an enjoyable edition of Shakespeare. I regard it rather as a necessary evil."[251] On another occasion, having been criticised about a certain statement of his, he wrote: "I now wish to state that my critic was entirely right and I entirely wrong." His work was a work of love, but it was also a work of reason, as befits a philosopher. He leaned throughout toward conservative methods, which have doubtless the fault of attracting less tumultuous attention to the worker: a great fault in the eyes of the many, a great quality in Furness's own.
His shrewd good sense, seconded by a no less enjoyable good humor, never failed him. When he began, one important question had first to be decided: would he admit in his work only textual and philological criticisms or also æsthetic criticism, mere poetry, sheer literature? To many the temptation would have been great to exclude the latter, the fashion being among the most haughty, if not the most learned, of the learned to doubt the seriousness, laboriousness, usefulness of any who can enjoy, in a play of Shakespeare's, something else than doubtful readings and misprints. This school is less new than is generally believed, and in his Temple du Goût Voltaire had already represented the superb critics of the matter-of-fact school answering those who asked them whether they would not visit the temple:
"Nous, Messieurs, point du tout.
Ce n'est pas là, grâce à Dieu, notre étude;
Le goût n'est rien, nous avons l'habitude
De rédiger au long, de point en point,
Ce qu'on pensa, mais nous ne pensons point."
The fact is that, as Furness well perceived from the first, the two elements should no more be separated than soul from body. Without accuracy, literary criticism is mere trumpery; without a sense of the beautiful, mere accuracy is deathlike. Much so-called æsthetic criticism, wrote Furness, "is flat, stale, unprofitable.... But shall we ignore the possible existence of a keener insight than our own?... Are we not to listen eagerly and reverently when Coleridge or Goethe talks about Shakespeare?"
With such a rule in mind he made his selections, pruning what he deemed should be pruned: "rejectiones et exclusiones debitas," as Bacon would have said. But one more kind of thing he excluded, and this is an eminently characteristic trait of his. His gentleness (not a weak, but a manly one) rebelled at others' acerbity, and when he saw appear that unwelcome and somewhat abundant element in modern criticism, he simply left it out: no admittance for any such thing within the covers of a gentleman-scholar's gentlemanly and scholarly work. True it is that, while Shakespeare is the author most read—after the Bible, it is also the one about which the most furious and unchristian disputes have been waged—after the Bible. The Philadelphia scholar wanted all the critics admitted within his fold to keep the peace there, and he adopted the following rule: "First, all unfavorable criticism of fellow critics is excluded as much as possible.... To confound Goethe, Schlegel, or Tieck is one thing, to elucidate Shakespeare is another." He went even further, and since he could not quote whole books and had to select, "the endeavor," he said, "in all honesty has been to select from every author the passages wherein he appears to best advantage." What critic, then, can be imagined so blind to the service rendered, so much in love with his own harshness, that would not feel toward Furness as Queen Katharine toward Griffith:
After my death I wish no other herald,
No other speaker of my living actions,
To keep mine honor from corruption,
But such an honest chronicler as—Furness.
His friendly appreciation of French critics (who, with all they lacked in early days, were, after all, the first to form, outside of England, an opinion on Shakespeare, the oldest one being of about 1680) cannot but touch a French heart. "It has given me especial pleasure," he said in the Introduction to his first volume, "to lay before the English reader the extracts from the French; it is but little known, in this country at least, outside the ranks of Shakespeare students, how great is the influence which Shakespeare at this hour is exerting on French literature, and how many and how ardent are his admirers in this nation." He had even, at a later date, a good word for poor Ducis and his Hamlet, a Hamlet truly Ducis's own.
Nor shall I ever forget in what tones, amidst friendly applause, the great scholar spoke of France in his own city of Philadelphia, at the memorable gathering of April 20, 1906, when, in accordance with the will of the nation as expressed by Congress, a medal was offered to my country to commemorate her reception of Franklin at the hour when the fate of the States was still weighing in the balance.
In the early years of manhood one sees, far ahead on the road, those great thinkers, scientists, master men, tall, powerful, visible from a distance, ready to help the passer-by, like great oaks offering their shade. They seem so strong, so far above the common that the thought never occurs that we of the frailer sort may see the day when they will be no more. Who was ever present at the death of an oak? Whoever thought that he could see the day when he would accompany Robert Browning's remains to Westminster or mourn for the disappearance of Taine or Gaston Paris? The feeling I had for them I had for Furness, too. Was it possible to think that this solid oak would fall?
He himself, however, had misgivings, and it seemed, of late years, as if the dear ones who had gone before were beckoning to him. "Do you remember," he wrote me in 1909, "my sister, Mrs. Wister, to whom I had the pleasure of introducing you at the Franklin celebration? I am now living under the black and heavy shadow of her loss. She left me last November, solitary and alone, aching for the 'sound of a voice that is silent.'" And at a more recent date: "I have been so shattered by the blows of fate that I doubt you'll ever again receive a printed forget-me-not from me."
And now, in our turn, members of the American Philosophical Society, members of the Shakespeare Societies of the world, members innumerable of the republic of letters, we too ache for "the sound of a voice that is silent." On the signet with which he used to seal his letters, Furness had engraved a motto, which is the best summing up of Emperor Marcus Aurelius's firm and resigned philosophy: "This, too, will pass away."
