EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN

MODERN CHIVALRY

66

[Lecture by Edwin H. Chapin, pastor of the Fourth Universalist Church (afterward the "Church of the Divine Paternity"), New York, for upward of thirty years (born in Union Village, Washington County, New York, December 29, 1814; died in New York City, December 27, 1880), delivered repeatedly in the height of his career as a popular lyceum lecturer. Famous as a pulpit orator, Dr. Chapin early took rank among the foremost popular lecturers of his day, entering the lecture field in 1838 during the first years of his ministry when settled in Richmond, Va.; and he acquired the sobriquet of a “prince of the lyceum platform." Modern Chivalry" was one of the lectures in the list upon which his reputation was established, and, his biographer states, served on nearly three hundred platforms. It was rewritten at least once, and often changed in its delivery to fit the place and occasion. It is here given as delivered in Boston, in the "Fraternity Course," December 27, 1859. It was Dr. Chapin who, in reply to an inquiry for his terms for a lecture, or "what he lectured for?" once sent this telegram (credited to several other lecturers): "For F-A-M-E," which, being interpreted, signified, "fifty, and my expenses." This, it is explained, was in the early days of the lyceum; Dr. Chapin's fees in later times reached the highest figures commanded by lyceum lecturers.]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-A popular English periodical has recently entertained its readers with a story of a ghost in a railroad-car. Our first idea respecting this may very well be that of incongruity between the incident and the machine. The lawful domain of spectres is the bloody chamber and the crumbling tower-" Otranto," "Udolpho," or, "Marianna's Lonely Moated Grange." They hardly find congenial conditions in the general whirl and shake-up of forty miles an hour. At least, there is someCopyright, 1901, by A. C. Butters.

thing demoniacal rather than ghostly in the breath of the locomotive and the shriek of the steam-whistle. The feeling of incongruity, in this instance, however, is only one indication of the conceit that our age of iron is not hospitable to the more spiritual elements; that spiritualism is exhausted by science, imagination crushed by fact, and the qualities of heroic devotion smothered in the mercenary processes of trade and manufacture.

We are told that the age of chivalry has passed away; but it will be my object in the present lecture to show that chivalry itself has not passed away: that its conditions, its characteristics and its work are existent still, and likely to exist. The actual argument in this case might, perhaps, be summed up in the general proposition, that each age holds the contents of all the other ages; one era, of course, distinguished from another by some predominating element. So there has been an age of chivalry—the age of chivalry. It lies back there in its old realm of romance, the very May-time of modern history; or, rather, with its castellated grandeur, its picturesque shapes, its flushings of splendid enthusiasm and adventure, it lingers on the horizon from which we recede like a belt of clouds, kindling our youthful imagination and feeding our rarer memories and suggesting a region of beauty now inaccessible and far away. But when we bring it nearer to us with the lens of historical investigation, we find that its peculiarity consists in the culmination of certain forms, not in the exclusive possession of the spirit.

Now, in this fact that the ages are vesicular, that history is organic, not fragmentary, and the boundaries of epochs merely artificial, there is ground both for humility and hope. In the first place, it rebukes our conceit of progress, or, rather, it alters our estimate of progress, which identifies "going ahead" with going up, and assumes a logic which would prove that the child must be better than its father. It is interesting, but also somewhat humiliating, to see how, in all ages, the instincts of men run on the same parallel lines, so that the grandest achievements which appear from time to time are only acts of repetition or recovery. We dig up Trojan's galley from the depths of an Italian lake, and discover our own practice of caulking and sheathing ships. In the lonesome.

streets of Herculanaeum and Pompeii, we stumble upon types of some of our modern inventions. It startles us to find the law of gravitation taught long before Newton, and the circulation of the blood ages previous to the time of Harvey. It is as though human history ran in cycles, in which not only the general outlines of events occur, but even the specific and individual instances. In short, nothing is really gained in the way of substantial and absolute good, if the difference between one time and another is only a difference in degree-merely extension on the same plan. Our movements may be more rapid, our instruments may be more marvelous, but progress is not to be predicated merely upon an accumulation of facilities, which are only the same means to the same ends. There is no more glory in a locomotive or a steamship than in a caravan toiling through the desert, or a Phoenician boat coasting the shores of Britain, if the purposes they represent are the same. The glory of human achievement is not in its instruments; the idea of human action is according to its nature.

In these similitudes of history, then, there is this amount of repression for this most vociferous age, the Nineteenth century, which is so much inclined to play the game of brag with all its predecessors. But this tendency to exultation is fully balanced by the tendency to disparagement. It seems as if the main current were running in the latter direction. Serious complaints are lodged against the period in which we live as being utterly sordid, materialistic, and empty of any real noble life. Those old ages of trust and valor, glorified with elevated achievement, enriched with a manhood that tried to build itself up for some sublime type, are sorrowfully contrasted with the time when the sharp outlines of knowledge leave but few recesses for faith, when superstition, which was at least inspiring, seems chiefly exchanged for a barren rationalism, and the investigation of nature dissolves before the science which calculates the mechanical value of a cubic mile of sunshine. [Applause.]

And here, in opposition to this severe disparagement of the present, I take up the purpose of my lecture, to maintain that what was essentially admirable in those chivalric ages crops out even in this, and redeems it from

this heavier allegation. My object is strictly practical. I believe that it is best for every man to think well of his own time. We have no more right to calumniate an age than we have to slander a man; and I think there are a good many instances in which our Nineteenth century would be fully warranted in bringing an action and suing for damages. [Applause.] At least, I believe there is more inspiration for effort in the hopeful than in the despondent conception, and, therefore, that we are justified in giving prominence to the elements upon which that hope may rest. I shall endeavor to show that we have, in our own period, first, the conditions; second, the characteristics; and, finally, the work of a genuine chivalry.

In estimating the conditions of true chivalry we ought to take into consideration the tendency which exists in the human mind to magnify the stature and the glory of the past. Distance lends the same advantages in time that it does in space. In surveying the historical landscape, we must allow for perspective. We have by no means all the bad things or all the shabby things. Ideal excellence was as far off in the "age of chivalry" as it is now. In actual life, I suspect, there was no more poetry then than there is now. A knight-errant, "hard-up" and unable to pay for mending his helmet, must have been as prosaic a person as a man "shinning" through State street. A lascivious. baron, in his vulture-vest of blood and rapine, was precisely as interesting as any genteel blood-sucker you might find about town.

Macaulay has asserted that "as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. Thus, the possibility of a great epic diminishes with the development of philosophical criticism and utilitarian influences." The soundness of this doctrine depends somewhat upon our definition of poetry. If it consists merely in the power of objective description, it may be that the best, and therefore the most enduring, poetry does cluster about the earlier ages of the world, for the poet of those days had his pick; his were the heavens, the earth, and the unbounded sea; and he saw the working of those emotions and passions which constitute the ground-swell of all poetry, which are as palpable and universal as the nature of man. The fervors of love, the clash of war, the mysterious depths of

religious feeling, have long since found an unsurpassable utterance. The old kings of song abide upon their thrones forever; they are few, indeed, who may go up and sit with them. But even admitting that the possibility of poetic creation does go out with advancing civilization, still, upon this ground, I would maintain that proof of poetic vitality in our own age appears in the recognition which the age gives to genuine poetry of all ages. But if we pass beyond this objective definition, and admit the subjective element, which involves the subtle intermodifications of passion, the facts that start out under a searching introspection, then the possibility of poetic creation is not diminished with the increase of culture, and our modern era can, and does, produce works that will live through all time. However, I will not in any way admit the premises that give rise to this discussion. I do not believe that the legitimate objects of poetry are thinned out by the precision of science. In other words, I cannot consent to the proposition that there is an “irrepressible conflict " between the beautiful and the true, and that the one excludes the other. Let it be granted that the impossibilities of legend, the beautiful nonsense of mythology, and all "the fair humanities of old religion," have vanished before the accumulation of useful knowledge; still, how far has our knowledge penetrated into the region of the unknown! What mysteries of life, what vast circles of truth still quiver on the outmost rim of the great wheel of nature! Every great discovery only tends to show us that the treasury of suggestion is inexhaustible, and the galleries of imagination stretch far away. The beautiful conceits and grand shadows that are incorporated with the heart and life of the poetry of our time are only transfigured and thrown upon a broader canvas. The vulgarity, the dullness, the materialism of our day are, of course, only too conspicuous, but these, alas! seem not to be for our age, or for any age, but for all time. Meanness is a crop as old as grass! But so far as the chivalric quality needs to be saturated in poetic influences, the conditions abundantly exist. [Applause.]

It is often urged that periods of public and private greatness have always been co-ordinate with periods of intellectual obscuration. This statement amounts to the