Speeches: Literary and Social

THE OXFORD AND HARVARD BOAT RACE. SYDENHAM, AUGUST 30, 1869

[The International University Boat Race having taken place on
August 27, the London Rowing Club invited the Crews to a Dinner at
the Crystal Palace on the following Monday. The dinner was
followed by a grand display of pyrotechnics. Mr. Dickens, in
proposing the health of the Crews, made the following speech:]

Gentlemen, flushed with fireworks, I can warrant myself to you as
about to imitate those gorgeous illusions by making a brief spirt
and then dying out. And, first of all, as an invited visitor of
the London Rowing Club on this most interesting occasion, I will
beg, in the name of the other invited visitors present--always
excepting the distinguished guests who are the cause of our
meeting--to thank the president for the modesty and the courtesy
with which he has deputed to one of us the most agreeable part of
his evening's duty. It is the more graceful in him to do this
because he can hardly fail to see that he might very easily do it
himself, as this is a case of all others in which it is according
to good taste and the very principles of things that the great
social vice, speech-making, should hide it diminished head before
the great social virtue action. However, there is an ancient story
of a lady who threw her glove into an arena full of wild beasts to
tempt her attendant lover to climb down and reclaim it. The lover,
rightly inferring from the action the worth of the lady, risked his
life for the glove, and then threw it rightly in her face as a
token of his eternal adieu. {16} I take up the President's glove,
on the contrary, as a proof of his much higher worth, and of my
real interest in the cause in which it was thrown down, and I now
profess my readiness to do even injustice to the duty which he has
assigned me.

Gentlemen, a very remarkable and affecting volume was published in
the United States within a short time before my last visit to that
hospitable land, containing ninety-five biographies of young men,
for the most part well-born and well nurtured, and trained in
various peaceful pursuits of life, who, when the flag of their
country waved them from those quiet paths in which they were
seeking distinction of various kinds, took arms in the dread civil
war which elicited so much bravery on both sides, and died in the
defence of their country. These great spirits displayed
extraordinary aptitude in the acquisition, even in the invention,
of military tactics, in the combining and commanding of great
masses of men, in surprising readiness of self-resource for the
general good, in humanely treating the sick and the wounded, and in
winning to themselves a very rare amount of personal confidence and
trust. They had all risen to be distinguished soldiers; they had
all done deeds of great heroism; they had all combined with their
valour and self-devotion a serene cheerfulness, a quiet modesty,
and a truly Christian spirit; and they had all been educated in one
school--Harvard University.

Gentlemen, nothing was more remarkable in these fine descendants of
our forefathers than the invincible determination with which they
fought against odds, and the undauntable spirit with which they
resisted defeat. I ask you, who will say after last Friday that
Harvard University is less true to herself in peace than she was in
war? I ask you, who will not recognise in her boat's crew the
leaven of her soldiers, and who does not feel that she has now a
greater right than ever to be proud of her sons, and take these
sons to her breast when they return with resounding acclamations?
It is related of the Duke of Wellington that he once told a lady
who foolishly protested that she would like to see a great victory
that there was only one thing worse than a great victory, and that
was a great defeat.

But, gentlemen, there is another sense in which to use the term a
great defeat. Such is the defeat of a handful of daring fellows
who make a preliminary dash of three or four thousand stormy miles
to meet great conquerors on their own domain--who do not want the
stimulus of friends and home, but who sufficiently hear and feel
their own dear land in the shouts and cheers of another--and who
strive to the last with a desperate tenacity that makes the beating
of them a new feather in the proudest cap. Gentlemen, you agree
with me that such a defeat is a great, noble part of a manly,
wholesome action; and I say that it is in the essence and life-
blood of such a defeat to become at last sure victory.

Now, gentlemen, you know perfectly well the toast I am going to
propose, and you know equally well that in thus glancing first
towards our friends of the white stripes, I merely anticipate and
respond to the instinctive courtesy of Oxford towards our brothers
from a distance--a courtesy extending, I hope, and I do not doubt,
to any imaginable limits except allowing them to take the first
place in last Friday's match, if they could by any human and
honourable means be kept in the second. I will not avail myself of
the opportunity provided for me by the absence of the greater part
of the Oxford crew--indeed, of all but one, and that, its most
modest and devoted member--I will not avail myself of the golden
opportunity considerately provided for me to say a great deal in
honour of the Oxford crew. I know that the gentleman who attends
here attends under unusual anxieties and difficulties, and that if
he were less in earnest his filial affection could not possibly
allow him to be here.

It is therefore enough for me, gentlemen, and enough for you, that
I should say here, and now, that we all unite with one accord in
regarding the Oxford crew as the pride and flower of England--and
that we should consider it very weak indeed to set anything short
of England's very best in opposition to or competition with
America; though it certainly must be confessed--I am bound in
common justice and honour to admit it--it must be confessed in
disparagement of the Oxford men, as I heard a discontented
gentleman remark--last Friday night, about ten o'clock, when he was
baiting a very small horse in the Strand--he was one of eleven with
pipes in a chaise cart--I say it must be admitted in disparagement
of the Oxford men on the authority of this gentleman, that they
have won so often that they could afford to lose a little now, and
that "they ought to do it, but they won't."

Gentlemen, in drinking to both crews, and in offering the poor
testimony of our thanks in acknowledgment of the gallant spectacle
which they presented to countless thousands last Friday, I am sure
I express not only your feeling, and my feeling, and the feeling of
the Blue, but also the feeling of the whole people of England, when
I cordially give them welcome to our English waters and English
ground, and also bid them "God speed" in their voyage home. As the
greater includes the less, and the sea holds the river, so I think
it is no very bold augury to predict that in the friendly contests
yet to come and to take place, I hope, on both sides of the
Atlantic--there are great river triumphs for Harvard University yet
in store. Gentlemen, I warn the English portion of this audience
that these are very dangerous men. Remember that it was an
undergraduate of Harvard University who served as a common seaman
two years before the mast, {17} and who wrote about the best sea
book in the English tongue. Remember that it was one of those
young American gentlemen who sailed his mite of a yacht across the
Atlantic in mid-winter, and who sailed in her to sink or swim with
the men who believed in him.

And now, gentlemen, in conclusion, animated by your cordial
acquiescence, I will take upon myself to assure our brothers from a
distance that the utmost enthusiasm with which they can be received
on their return home will find a ready echo in every corner of
England--and further, that none of their immediate countrymen--I
use the qualifying term immediate, for we are, as our president
said, fellow countrymen, thank God--that none of their compatriots
who saw, or who will read of, what they did in this great race, can
be more thoroughly imbued with a sense of their indomitable courage
and their high deserts than are their rivals and their hosts to-
night. Gentlemen, I beg to propose to you to drink the crews of
Harvard and Oxford University, and I beg to couple with that toast
the names of Mr. Simmons and Mr. Willan.