Clement King Shorter

“ In each writer you can trace the influence of our soil in a peculiar degree, and particularly in Borrow. Borrow was proud of being an East Anglian, and we are proud of him. In Lavengro, I venture to assert, we have the greatest example of prose style in our modern literature, and I rejoice to see a growing Borrow cult, a cult that is based not on an acceptance of the narrower side of Borrow—his furious ultra-Protestantism, for example—as was the popularity that he once enjoyed, but upon the fact that he was a magnificent artist in words. No artist in words but is influenced by environment. ”

“ But let us all do everything we can to make secure the high and honourable achievement of George Borrow, to kindle an interest in him and his writings, to extend a taste for the undoubted beauties of his works among all classes of his fellow-citizens—that is to secure Borrow the best of all monuments. More durable than brass will be the memorial that is contained in the assurance that he possesses the reverence and the homage of all true Norfolk hearts. ”

“ The story of Isopel Berners is a piece of imaginative writing that certainly has no superior in the literature of the last century. It was assuredly no photographic experience. Isopel Berners is herself a creation ranking among the fine creations of womanhood of the finest writers. I doubt not but that it was inspired by some actual memory of Borrow—the memory of some early love affair in which the distractions of his mania for word-learning—the Armenian and other languages—led him to pass by some opportunity of his life, losing the substance for the shadow. ”

“ That lack of charity followed Borrow throughout his life. He was libelled by many, by Miss Frances Power Cobbe most of all. However, the great city of Norwich will make up for it in the future, and she will love Borrow as Borrow indisputably loved her. How he praised her fine cathedral, her lordly castle, her Mousehold Heath, her meadows in which he once saw a prize fight, her pleasant scenery—no city, not even glorious Oxford, has been so well and adequately praised, and I desire to show that that praise is not for an age but for all time. ”

“ I find in The Task and elsewhere in Cowper’s works a note of enthusiasm for human brotherhood, for man’s responsibility for man, for universal kinship, that had scarcely any place in literature before he wrote quietly here at Olney thoughts wiser and saner than he knew. To-day we call ourselves by many names, Conservatives or Liberals, Radicals, or Socialists; we differ widely as to ways and means; but we are all practically agreed about one thing—that the art of politics is the art of making the world happier. ”

“ If so, you succeed in doing what else no fate can do; you will have crushed and shattered one of the hardest of men, who could withstand unflinchingly all outward storms. No, I can never survive such treachery. It will kill me inwardly and outwardly. It is not possible that you are so dishonourable, so shameless, so reckless of duty, so utterly unworthy and infamous. If you were, you would deserve of me the most deadly hatred. You would deserve the contempt of the world. Helen, it is not your own resolution which you have communicated to Rüstow. ”

“ Think of an historian whose ideal of historical work was so high that he despised all who worked only from printed documents, selecting the Memorial of St. Helena of Las Casas in preference not only to a hundred-and-one similar compilations concerning Napoleon’s exile, but in preference to Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon.
Sometimes Lord Acton names a theologian who is absolutely out-of-date, at others a philosopher who is in the same case. But on the whole it is a fascinating list as an index to what a well-trained mind thought the noblest mental equipment for life’s work. ”

“ There can be little doubt but that a remote ancestor of George Crabbe took his name from the “shellfish,” as we all persist, in spite of the naturalist, in calling it; and the poet did not hesitate to attribute it to the vanity of an ancestor that his name had had two letters added. Nor when we hear of Cromer crabs, or crabs from some other part of Norfolk as distinct from what I am sure is equally palatable, the crustacean as it may be found in Aldeburgh, are we remote from the story of our poet’s life. For there cannot be a doubt but that Norfolk shares with Suffolk the glory of his origin. ”

“ Surely Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, make an universal appeal. That universal appeal is the point at which alone guidance is possible. There are great books that can be read only by the few, but surely the very greatest appeal alike to the educated and the illiterate, to the man of rich intellectual endowment and to the man to whom all processes of reasoning are incomprehensible. ”

“ In no one have I found united so much enthusiasm and practical intelligence.
“In every line,” says Brandes, “this letter shows the far-seeing student of life, indeed, the prophet!”
Lassalle is not backward in reciprocating the enthusiasm.
p. 188“I love Heine,” he declares; “he is my second self. What audacity! what crushing eloquence! He knows how to whisper like a zephyr when it kisses rose-blooms, how to breathe like fire when it rages and destroys; he calls forth all that is tenderest and softest, and then all that is fiercest and most daring. ”

“ It is my pleasant occupation to-night to endeavour to show that Borrow, the very least of these men and women in public estimation for a good portion of his life, and perhaps the least in popular judgment even since his death, was really the greatest, was really the man of all others to whom this beautiful city should do honour if it asks for a name out of its nineteenth century history to crown with local recognition. ”

“ It has given us indeed in William Cowper and George Crabbe the two most natural and the two most human poets in the English literature of two centuries, only excepting the favourite poet of Scotland—Robert Burns. It is to these of all writers that I would pin my faith in talking of East Anglia and its literature; it is their names that I would have you keep in your mind when you call up memories of the literature which has most inspired our East Anglian life.
In connexion with many writers a point of importance will occur to us. ”

“ You have always heard of Borrow and of his works, but I think I am entitled to insist that when Borrow sank into his grave, an old, and to many an eccentric and bitter man, he had fallen into the most curious oblivion with the public that has ever come to a man, I will not say of equal distinction, but of any distinction whatever. ”

“ Here I make an interesting claim for East Anglia, that it has given us in Captain Marryat perhaps the very greatest prose writer of the nineteenth century who has been a delight to youth, and two of the very greatest prose writers of all times for the inspiration of middle-age, Sir Thomas Browne and George Borrow. It has given us in Sarah Austin an example of a learned woman who was also a fascinating woman; it has given us again the most remarkable letter-writers in the English language—Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole and Edward FitzGerald. ”

“ But I do not pin my claim for Borrow upon that fact—the fact of three generations of his mother’s family at Dumpling Green—or even on the fact that he was born near East Dereham. There is nothing more certain than that we are all of us influenced greatly by our environment, and that it is this, quite as much as birth or ancestry, that gives us what characteristics we possess. It is the custom, for example, to call Swift an Irishman, whereas Swift came of English parentage and lived for many of his most impressionable years in England. ”

“ Johnson, the lover of letters gives the second place, not to Miss Seward and her circle, but to David Garrick. Lichfield contains more than one memento of that great man. The actor’s art is a poor sort of thing as a rule. Johnson, in his tarter moments, expresses this attitude, as when he talked of Garrick as a man who exhibited himself for a shilling, when he called him ‘a futile fellow,’ and implied that it was very unworthy of Lord Campden to have made much of the actor and to have ignored so distinguished a writer as Goldsmith, when thrown into the company of both. ”

“ George Crabbe as no poet was ever made before or since. To me there is no picture in all literature more unflaggingly interesting than that of the great man, whose life was so full of affairs, taking the poor young stranger by the hand, reading through his abundant manuscripts, and therefrom selecting—as the poet was quite unable to select—The Library and The Village as the most suitable for publication, helping him to a publisher, introducing him to friends, and proving himself quite untiring on his behalf. ”

“ We do well, however, to celebrate his centenary, because it is good at certain periods to remember our indebtedness to the great men who have helped us in literature or in life. But that is not to say that we work for the dethronement of later favourites. “Each age must write its own books,” says Emerson, and this is particularly the case with the great body of poetry. Cowper, however, will live to all time among students of literature by his longer poems; he will live to all time among the multitude by his ballads and certain of his lyrics. ”

“ To possess these books is largely a collector’s hobby. They are interesting, but they would not have made for the author an undying reputation. Further, you may not care for The Bible in Spain, you may be untouched by the Gypsies in Spain and Wild Wales, and even then I will not deny to you the title of a good Borrovian, if only you pronounce Lavengro and The Romany Rye to be among the greatest books you know. I can admire the Gypsies in Spain and Wild Wales. I can read The Bible in Spain with something of the enthusiasm with which our fathers read it. ”

“ We cannot all love Crabbe as much as FitzGerald loved him, but this gathering will not be vain if after this we handle his volumes more lovingly, read his poems more sympathetically, and continue with more zeal than ever before to be proud of the man who, born in Aldeburgh a century and a half ago, is closely identified with this county of Suffolk as I believe no other great writer is closely identified with any county in England. An Aldeburgh man—a Suffolk man he was—yet even more in the future than in the past, he is destined to gain the whole world for his parish. ”

“ That poem by FitzGerald will live as long as the English language, and let it never be forgotten that it is the work of an East Anglian, an East Anglian who, like Borrow, possessed a marked Celtic quality, the outcome of a famous Irish ancestry, nevertheless of an East Anglian who loved its soil, its rivers and its sea.
Then I come to another phase of East Anglian literary traditions. It is astonishing what a zest for learning its women have displayed; I might give you quite a long list of distinguished women who have come out of East Anglia. ”

“ When an attempt was once made to stir up the Great Eastern Railway to identify this district with the name of Crabbe as the English Lakes were identified with the name of Wordsworth, and the Scots Lakes with that of Sir Walter Scott, a high official of the railway made the statement that up to that moment he had never even heard the name of Crabbe. Well, all that is going to be changed. I do not at all approve of the phrase beloved of certain book-makers and of railway companies that implies that any county or district is the monopoly of one man, be he ever so great a writer. ”

“ Johnson, but of all good literature, p. 5come to Lichfield. Four cathedral cities of our land stand forth in my mind with a certain magnetic power to draw even the most humble lover of books towards them—Oxford, Bath, Norwich, Lichfield, these four and no others. Oxford we all love and revere as the nourishing mother of so many famous men. Here we naturally recall Dr. Johnson’s love of it—his defence of it against all comers. The glamour of Oxford and the memory of the great men who from age to age have walked its streets and quadrangles, is with us upon every visit. ”

“ Lastly, among Cowper’s many excellencies as a poet let me note his humour. His pathos, his humanity—many fine qualities he has in common with others; but what shall we say of his humour? If the ubiquitous Scot were present, so far from his native heath—and I daresay we have one or two with us—he might claim that humour was also the prerogative of Robert Burns. He might claim, also, that certain other great characteristics of Cowper were to be found almost simultaneously in Burns. ”

“ The greatest poet is not the one who is most sincere—a very bad poet can be that—but the poet who expresses that sincerity with the most perfect art. From this point of view the poets before Cowper and Crabbe, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson and others were scarcely poets at all. ”

“ With the exception of Dante’s Divine Comedy there is practically not a single book that has any title whatever to a place in the Literature of Power, a literature which many of us think the only thing in the world of books worth consideration. ”

“ It is a valuable inspiration to men to keep up their spirits under adverse conditions, to conquer the weaknesses of their natures; not in the stifling manner of Thomas à Kempis, but in a breezy, robust way. Yes, I think that these three works, Rasselas, The Lives of the Poets, and the Prayers and Meditations, make it quite clear that Johnson still holds his place as one of our greatest writers, even if we were not familiar with his many delightful letters, and had not read his Rambler—which his old enemy, Miss Anna Seward, insisted was far better than Addison’s Spectator. ”

“ To have been praised ardently by Sir Walter Scott, by Byron, and by Tennyson should seem sufficient to demonstrate that he was a poet, were it not that, as I could prove if time allowed, poets are almost invariably bad critics of poetry. Sir Walter Scott read The Vanity of Human Wishes with “a choking sensation in the throat,” and declared that he had more pleasure in reading that and Johnson’s other long poem, London, than any other poetic compositions he could mention. But then I think it was always the sentiment in verse, and not its quality, that attracted Scott. ”