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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA
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CONTENTS
AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY
AMERICAN AND BRITON
FROM A SPEECH AT THE LOTUS CLUB, NEW YORK
FROM A SPEECH TO THE SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, NEW YORK
ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
TO THE LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION, NEW YORK
TALKING AT LARGE
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AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY
" ... 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, he ran the gamut of those qualities as none of the others did; and as critic and analyst of literature surpassed them all."
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July 24, 2021 - July 24, 2021.
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AMERICAN AND BRITON
Mostly a reworded speech, at most, if not verbatim, from his writings in Another Sheaf, and generally his thoughts on the theme, expressed throughout his essays.
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July 24, 2021 - July 24, 2021.
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FROM A SPEECH AT THE LOTUS CLUB, NEW YORK
"I WONDER whether you in America can realise what an entrancing voyage of discovery you represent to us primeval Anglo-Britons. I prefer that term to Anglo-Saxon, for even if we English glory in the thought that our seaborne ancestors were extremely bloodthirsty, we have no evidence that they brought their own women to Britain in any quantities, or had the power of reproducing themselves without aid from the other sex!"
So Anglo-Saxons were invaders, not migrants? Sounds much more plausible.
................................................................................................"It will not have escaped you, at all events, that for four years the various branches of the English-speaking peoples have been credited with all the virtues — a love of liberty, humanity, and justice has, as it were, been patented for them on both sides of the Atlantic, and under the Southern Cross, till one has come to listen with a sort of fascinated terror for those three words to tinkle from the tongue."
Rabbit-proof Fence, anyone? Or is he speaking of liberty etc, only as applied to European races?
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July 24, 2021 - July 24, 2021.
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FROM A SPEECH TO THE SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, NEW YORK
" ... daylight town belongs to the Sciences, the night-lit town to the Arts. ... "
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July 24, 2021 - July 24, 2021.
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ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
About sanitation, town verses country, gadarening, and more.
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July 24, 2021 - July 24, 2021.
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TO THE LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION, NEW YORK
" ... What is the Ultima Thule of our longings? I suppose one ought to say, roughly, that the modern ideal is: Maximum production of wealth to the square mile of a country — an ideal which, seeing that a man normally produces wealth in surplus to his own requirements, signifies logically a maximum head of population to the square mile. And it seems to me that the great modern fallacy is the identification of the word wealth with the word welfare. Granted that demand creates supply, and that it is impossible to stop human nature from demanding, the problem is surely to direct demand into the best channels for securing health and happiness. And I venture to say that the mere blind production of wealth and population by no means fills that bill. We ought to produce wealth only in such ways and to such an extent as shall make us all good, clean, healthy, intelligent, and beautiful to look at."
"I would have all educational institutions financed by the State, but give all the directing power to heads of education elected by the main body of teachers themselves. I would not have education dependent on advertisement or on charity. I would not even have newspapers, which are an educational force — though you might not always think so — dependent on advertisements. ... "
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July 24, 2021 - July 24, 2021.
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TALKING AT LARGE
"The division deep and subtle between those who have fought and those who have not — concerns us in Europe far more than you in America; for in proportion to your population the number of your soldiers who actually fought has been small, compared with the number in any belligerent European country. And I think that so far as you are concerned the division will soon disappear, for the iron had not time to enter into the souls of your soldiers. ... Perhaps only of the Briton may one still invent the picture which appeared in Punch in the autumn of 1914 — of the steward on a battleship asking the naval lieutenant: “Will you take your bath before or after the engagement, sir?” and only among Britons overhear one stoker say to another in the heat of a sea-fight: “Well, wot I say is—’E ought to ‘ave married ‘er.” ... "
" ... I hope it will never be forgotten that five million Britons were volunteers ... then he was plunged into such a hideous hell of horrible danger and discomfort as this planet has never seen; came out of it time and again, went back into it time and again; and finally emerged, shattered or unscathed, with a spirit at once uplifted and enlarged, yet bruised and ungeared for the old life of peace. Imagine such a man set back among those who have not been driven and grilled and crucified. What would he feel, and how bear himself? On the surface he would no doubt disguise the fact that he felt different from his neighbours — he would conform; but something within him would ever be stirring, a sort of superiority, an impatient sense that he had been through it and they had not; the feeling, too, that he had seen the bottom of things, that nothing he could ever experience again would give him the sensations he had had out there; that he had lived, and there could be nothing more to it. I don’t think that we others quite realise what it must mean to those men, most of them under thirty, to have been stretched to the uttermost, to have no illusions left, and yet have, perhaps, forty years still to live. There is something gained in them, but there’s something gone from them. The old sanctions, the old values won’t hold; are there any sanctions and values which can be made to hold? A kind of unreality must needs cling about their fives henceforth. This is a finespun way of putting it, but I think, at bottom, true."
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"The American Civil War was very long and very dreadful, but it was a human and humane business compared to what Europe has just come through. ... The spiritual point is this: In front of a man in ordinary civilised existence there hovers ever that moment in the future when he expects to prove himself more of a man than he has yet proved himself. For these soldiers of the Great Carnage the moment of probation is already in the past. They have proved themselves as they will never have the chance to do again, and secretly they know it. ... Human nature is elastic, and hope springs eternal; but a climax of experience and sensation cannot be repeated; I think these have reached and passed the uttermost climax; and in Europe they number millions."
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" ... I have observed that the rest of us, through reading about horrors, have lost the edge of our gentleness, and have got into the habit of thinking that it is the business of women and children to starve, if they happen to be German; ... families to be broken up if they happen to be aliens; and that a general carelessness as to what suffering is necessary and what is not, has set in. ... For sheer ferocity there is no place, you will have noticed, like a club full of old gentlemen. I expect the men who have come home from killing each other to show us the way back to brotherliness! ... "
"On the other hand one has often travelled in these last years with extreme embarrassment because our soldiers were so extraordinarily anxious that one should smoke their cigarettes, eat their apples, and their sausages. The marvels of comradeship they have performed would fill the libraries of the world."
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"In 1910, walking in Hyde Park with a writer friend, I remember saying: “It’s the hereditary autocracies in Germany, Austria, and Russia which make the danger of war.” He did not agree — but no two writers agree with each other at any given moment. “If only autocracies go down in the wreckage of this war!” was almost the first thought I put down in writing when the war broke out. Well, they are gone! They were an anachronism, and without them and the bureaucracies and secrecy which buttressed them we should not, I think, have had this world catastrophe. ... "
Was he surprised to hear of fascism et al, which never were veiled either in intentions or putting them into practice immediately?
" ... What then can be done to increase in the average voter intelligence and honesty, public spirit and independence? Nothing save by education. The Arts, the Schools, the Press. It is impossible to overestimate the need for vigour, breadth, restraint, good taste, enlightenment, and honesty in these three agencies. ... The burden is very specially on the shoulders of Public Men, and that most powerful agency the Press, which reports them. ... Report, I would almost say, now rules the world and holds the fate of man on the sayings of its many tongues. If the good sense of mankind cannot somehow restrain utterance and cleanse report, Democracy, so highly vaunted, will not save us; and all the glib words of promise spoken might as well have lain unuttered in the throats of orators. ... "
There is prophesy, almost, of Shirer and Hitler, respectively, foreshadowed in those sentences about reporter and orator.
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"Now take the function of the artist, of the man who in stone, or music, marble, bronze, paint, or words, can express himself, and his vision of life, truly and beautifully. Can we set limit to his value? The answer is in the affirmative. We set such limitation to his value that he has been known to die of it. And I would only venture to say here that if we don’t increase the store we set by him, we shall, in this reach-me-down age of machines and wholesale standardisations, emulate the Goths who did their best to destroy the art of Rome, and all these centuries later, by way of atonement, have filled the Thiergarten at Berlin and the City of London with peculiar brands of statuary, and are always writing their names on the Sphynx.
"I suppose the hardest lesson we all have to learn in life is that we can’t have things both ways. If we want to have beauty, that which appeals not merely to the stomach and the epidermis (which is the function of the greater part of industrialism), but to what lies deeper within the human organism, the heart and the brain, we must have conditions which permit and even foster the production of beauty. The artist, unfortunately, no less than the rest of mankind, must eat to live. Now, if we insist that we will pay the artist only for what fascinates the popular uneducated instincts, he will either produce beauty, remain unpaid and starve; or he will give us shoddy, and fare sumptuously every day. ... "
" ... We think too much of politics and too little of education. We treat it almost as cavalierly as the undergraduate treated the Master of Balliol. “Yes,” he said, showing his people round the quadrangle, “that’s the Master’s window;” then, picking up a pebble, he threw it against the window pane. “And that,” he said, as a face appeared, “is the Master!” Democracy has come, and on education Democracy hangs; the thread as yet is slender."
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Galsworthy discusses democracy, Bolshevism, air war, explosives, ... League of Nations.
" ... No one who, like myself, has recently experienced the sensation of landing in America after having lived in Europe throughout the war, can fail to realise the reluctance of Americans to commit themselves, and the difficulty Americans have in realising the need for doing so. But may I remind Americans that during the first years of the war there was practically the same general American reluctance to interfere in an old-world struggle; and that in the end America found that it was not an old-world but a world-struggle. It is entirely reasonable to dislike snatching chestnuts out of the fire for other people, and to shun departure from the letter of cherished tradition; but things do not stand still in this world; storm centres shift; and live doctrine often becomes dead dogma."
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July 24, 2021 - July 24, 2021.
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July 24, 2021 - July 24, 2021.
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