EE PLY
TO A RESOLUTION OF TUB
READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY
AT ITS ANNIVERSARY MEETING,
February 12th, 18613,
BY
Rt. Rev. STEPHEN ELLIOTT,
PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY.
PUBLISHED AT THE REQUEST OF THE* SOCIETY.
PURSE AND SON, PRINTERS.
1866.
Savannah, Jan. 9th, 1866.
Bishop Elliott :—Dear Sir,
At a meeting of the Georgia Historical Society held last evening,
the following resolution was unanimously adopted, and the under¬
signed was instructed to present you a copy.
Resolved, "That the Society respectfully ask the President to
present, as early as convenient, his views on the prospects of the
Society and the best method of increasing and extending its useful¬
ness."
It was §1 so suggested that the anniversai-y meeting would be a
suitable occasion, if it would be convenient for you.
I am very respectfully,
EASTON YONGE,
Recording Secretary.
ADDRESS.
—o
Gentlemen of the Georgia Historical Society:
In reply to a resolution of your honorable body,
conveyed to me through your Secretary, inviting me
to offer you, at this our anniversary meeting, my views
upon the feasibility of rendering our society, more use¬
ful to the community, of which it is the sole literary cor¬
poration, I offer you the following remarks.
It is very painful to admit it, but it is nevertheless the
truth, that the literary spirit, which once animated
Savannah, has almost entirely died out from lack
of cultivation. Although I have lived in Savan¬
nah only twenty-five years, I remember its society for
full forty years, having visited it very frequently dur¬
ing my boyhood and early manhood. Upon these visits,
I was brought into contact with its cleverest men and I
found among them a'very high standard of literary ex¬
cellence and of classical attainment. And while my
own recollection does not include the whole period of
the palmiest days of that cultivated and refined society,
I lived among those, who had been the compeers and
friends of such as had passed away. When I first re¬
member Savannah it was illustrated by the culture of
such men as Richard Henry Wilde, Anthony Barclay,
Charles Harris, Richard W. Habersham, Judge Berrien,
Alfred Cuthbert, Dr. Lemuel Kollock, Dr. Waring, Dr.
Marshall, Wm. B. Bulloch, and a host of younger men
6
just rising into* notice, and by the social influence of
William Gaston, of Thomas Young, of Petit De Yilers
and as he was universally called, of Jack Henry, who
gathered around their hospitable boards all that was
clever and refined, not only of her own citizens, but of
strangers from every quarter. And these men could go
back to earlier scholars, who had died out, to Cranstoun,
the accomplished rector of Christ Church, to Dr. Henry
Kollock, the eloquent minister of the Independent
Church, who has left upon this community as deep an
impress as any man of his time, to Noel and Woodruff
who led the bar, and to Grimes, whose medical reputa¬
tion was of the highest mark. With these freely inter¬
mingled such visitors as Spalding, the most widely read
man of his day, Wm. Cumming whose conversational
powers were of the most uncommon character, John
Forsyth, Governor Troup and Wm. H. Crawford, whose
reputations afterwards became national. And when
you recall these men (some of whom you have known
individually in their later days, and one or two of whom
yet survive to teach us what the rest were) and group
them, you will at once acknowledge, without underat-
ing the present times, that they were very superior to
any circle that we could collect to day. And when I
say this, I would cast no especial shame upon Savannah.
The same deterioration has occurred every where. There
could not be collected to-day in Richmond any such so¬
ciety as distinguished her sixty years ago, when Madi¬
son and Geo. Mason and Pendleton and Wickham and
Randolph and Tazewell might have been found at one ta¬
ble. Y ou could not assemble in Charleston now such men
as came together even in my early days, let alone those
who preceded them, when John Rutledge and the two
Pinckneys and Cheves and Julius Pringle and Wm.
Lowndes and Bond Ion, and men of that stamp, who had
7
been horsed at Westminster and had reafd law in the tem¬
ple, made every dinner-table a scene of rich intellectual
enjoyment. As late as forty-five or six years ago, when I
first remember Charleston distinctly, the whole commmn-
nity was daily aglow with the wit of the young men about
town, who threw off their fancies through the newspapers
and fly sheets, sure of finding an appreciative audience,
of such men as William Crafts, whose fugitive pieces are
among the purest gems of Southern literature, as
Henry Harby whose cleverness promised a higher posi¬
tion than he ever assumed, as Holland, whose wit found
an early grave, as Tom Bee with the heavy university
scholarship of his Omnium gaiherum, and the young
bloods with their Omnium botherum got up bo make fun
of the old scholar, as a hundred others who made up
the literary coteries of the times. Alas no! it is not
Savannah alone; it is the whole country, Boston
perhaps excepted, which has lost literary tone and
taste. Democratic institutions and. levelling principles
have done their work, and save where some great liter¬
ary institution, with proper endowments to make it in¬
dependent of popular favor, has stayed the fiood, every¬
thing, which deserves the name of literature, lias been
swept away before the all absorbing interest of politics
of business and of practical life. Science has flourished and
advanced, because science is necessary to commerce, to
navigation and to the production of wealth, but literature,
which is only elegant and refining, has retired into pri¬
vate life, content to adorn the circles of home, but too
sensitive to brave the contemptuous and sneering spirit
of utilitarianism.
Can the old literary spirit be revived ? I fear not
to the extent to which it once existed or in which it
continues to exist in our Fatherland. Literature must
have a fitting audience to make it flourish and that au-
*r—
8
dience will regulate its tone. "We shall have iu the
United States an immense reading public; we have it
already. But what is the literature in which it
delights? Sensation novels, pictorial newspapers,
political sheets growing every day more vulgar
and abusive, jest books like the travels of Ar-
temus Ward or Phenixiana or Simon Suggs, and
Magazines full of false grammar, false taste and false¬
hood. This is the pabulum on which this great nation
daily feeds, now when its joints and sinews are knitting
together, when its habits of thought and feeling are be¬
ing formed, when its tone, which at last makes the true
greatness of a nation, is assuming shape and character.
Any heavier food than this turns its weak stomach.
Boston lying under the shadow of a great university is
really the only point which is producing any thing in
true literature and that is so impregnated with fanati¬
cism and rationalism, that it is not pleasant for us nor
safe for anybody to indulge mgcli in it. New York is a
great book mart, a great publishing centre, but she pro¬
duces now-a-days no such writers as Washington Irving,
Paulding, Yerplanck, Cooper or Bryant, all whose ra¬
ciest and most genuine writings are of the past. Phil¬
adelphia is a centre of science, but she has no literature
of her own, no art such as she once could boast of. Her
artists and her novelists, West, Sully, Stuart, Brockden,
Brown, liaVe died out and' left no successors. Every
literary review of a high order, which has been estab¬
lished in the United States, has expired after a very
brief existence. The North American Review, if it ex¬
ists at all, is languishing and has no influence upon the
country. The American Quarterly, after a few years
of most unutterable dulness, went out for want of
brains. The New York Review, of a much higher or¬
der of writing, could not withstand the inevitable law of
9
failure. The original Southern Review, whose articles
were, many of them, equal to the very best writ ing of the
Edinburgh, not excepting even Macaulay's, succumbed,
from lack of patronage, at the end of its fourth year.
Harper alone survives, because it is furnished with nu¬
merous engravings, and stoi ies by foreign writers and has
a monthly drawer of poor jokes, newer perhaps, but not as
good as Joe Miller. The fact is patent and cannot be de¬
nied. With the exception of a few historical works pro¬
duced in Boston and now and then a philological work by
such a true scholar as Marsh, all our literature conns
from abroad. Even our school books are plagiarized
wholesale from Germany, England and Scotland. The
taste of the nation is shockingly low and must be grati¬
fied, and this decline in taste has been coincident with
the passing away of the old English education, until
now it is satisfied only with frivolity or what is worse,
vulgarity and obscenity. 1 he caricature which appear¬
ed lately in one of our satirical papers is only too true.
Two young women are represented as applying at a cir¬
culating library for books, and the answer which they
receive from the shopman is "I regret very much, ladies,
that I have to-day no murder nor any adultery, but I am
expecting at the end of the week two bigamies."
It is possible however that a literary spirit may be
in a measure revived and that something may be done
even in the midst of the confusion which sur¬
rounds us, by means of the institution of which we are
the present administrators. The history of Georgia is
very limited, because of the late period at which she
was settled, and is not sufficient to occupy the whole at¬
tention of a society like this. Its topics of interest have
been already very much exhausted or are beyond our
reach, and for these reasons it is that so little interest
has, of late, been taken in our meetings. It is very
■ 10
pleasant to come together once a month and talk over
such things as amnse ns or interest us, but even then our
time is very much taken up with the mere routine of
society business or with the current news of the day,
there being very little else upon our table to engage
our attention. We need something more than this. We
need a resort which shall be open to our members every
day and all day; where they shall find the best literature
of the current time always at their command,and men and
women of culture to talk with about it, We have a
right to ask from a society like this, combining within
itself the best citizens of the place, that it shall furnish
a plan, by which mind may be brought into contact
with mind and the tone of conversation be raised above
politics or business or gossip. We may go on as we are
going nowr for a century and no young mind will be
fired to effort or excited to a higher life by our proceed¬
ings. We may meet month after month and do as we
are doing now and none of us will gain any thing from
our meetings of either knowledge or impulse, hfo new
topics are introduced; no new books lie uppn our table;
nothing comes before us which connects us with the
world across the water, that great centre of all that is
beautiful in art, or grand in science, or rich in literature.
We are in a condition of isolation and stagnation, and
the waters must be stirred. We may not be able by
our efforts to do all we might desire, but we can do
something. We may not create a literature, but we
may at least place what literature there is within the
reach of those around us. We can say to our young
men "we offer you the richest treasures of the old world
and of the new, and if you do not choose to elevate
yourselves, the fault will be at your own doors." We
can say to ou^ young women "here are art and literature
and elegance and refinement spread out for your enter-
11
tainment, but if you prefer Wilkie Collins, Miss Brad-
den and Mrs. Wood, you will have pobody'to blame
but yourselves, when the time of responsibility comes
and children are looking up to you for instruction and
guidance." We can say to our whole city, old and
young, "we desire you to rise once again to the level of
your ancestors, and we now prepare for you the means
which have been for a long time out of your reach, un¬
less provided at your own expense, and at an unattainable
cost." When we shall have done this, we shall have
done our duty, and may theu, if success is denied us,
feel no remorse, that we have left without any effort on
our part, our young people to the wretched influences
which are gathering around them.* The mind must be
fed; it craves nourishment and excitement as much as
the body, and if good food is not furnished it, it will
prey upon garbage.
In order to do our duty in this matter, we should, I
think, commence at once the accumulation of a library
which shall be worthy of such a city as Savannah, She
stands almost alone among cities of her population %n
being without a public library. And what is worse,
having had one, she has permitted it to decay until the
few broken sets of books which encumber our shelves
are all that is left of it. How different it is with our
neighboring city of Charleston. Her city library, only one
out of several, consists of nearly twenty thousand vol¬
umes of well chosen books, and there was scarcely a
topic, not strictly technical, which could not, when I
remember it, have been thoroughly examined within its
walls. To that library I owed as a boy, and still owe
as a man, unutterable gratitude. It seduced me from
play and from idleness, and most of my spare time was
spent curled up in its deep old window seats, among
books and living men from whom I derived invaluable
12
stimulus. The remembrance of this makes me desire
that such a resort-should be furnished to our boys and
young men. Mingling with books in childhood makes
us love them ; they become our friends for life; we
associate with them our young existence of joy and in¬
nocence, and we turn to them, in manhood and old age,
in sickness and in sorrow, as to something which shall
give us comfort and solace. A man loses much who
does not love books, for they are the only companions
we can always have with us, the only friends who will
certainly not leave us, when fortune frowns upon us or
the days of darkness come. Let us endeavor to furnish
these companions and friends for our children; com¬
panions and friends, which if well chosen, will never cor¬
rupt nor degrade them. And it is quite within our reach.
It is amazing how a library grows. A thousand or fif¬
teen hundred dollars a year well spent (and 1 see no
reason why we should not have double the amount at
our disposal) wrould very soon accumulate for us a very
respectable library, especially as we should not begin
with empty shelves. And the existence of such a li¬
brary would very soon become a matter of pride to the
citizens of Savannah, and donations and legacies would
flow in, which would give it a wider scope and a greater
comprehensiveness. For such a library should not be
confined merely to books, but its managers should aim
to procure for it works of art, statues and busts and
paintings and prints to educate the eye as well as the
mind. Elegance should pervade it and make it attrac¬
tive. "Woman should be enticed there to lend the charm
of her society to its graver topics. Materials and pri¬
vacy should be furnished severer students, so that they
might use to advantage such books as should never be
permitted to leave the walls of a library. To attain
this ideal, a beginning must be made and I know no
' —:—
13
better time tban this. We are entering upon a new era in
the history of our State, and let us do all in our power to
inaugurate it with refinement and culture, even though
it should prove to be a halo hovering around decay and
ruins. <
There is one thing moreover which seems to be essen¬
tial to our success in this plan, and that is a removal
from our present narrow quarters and a placing of our¬
selves in some more central position. The property
which we own, if properly handled, should procure for
us such a site and such a building as we need. The ac¬
cessibility of a library is one of its chief attractions.
It ought to stand in the centre of the great fashionable
-thoroughfare of the city, where men returning from
their business can stroll in if only for a few minutes, and
women may find it lying right across the pathway of
their daily walk. I have in my eye at this moment a
site fulfilling in every respect these requirements
and offering us space enough for all our purposes. It is
that now unoccupied spot where the Savannah Volun¬
teer Guards once held their military meetings, giving us
a fit opportunity of erecting a building in accordance
with our own ideas.
If these views should prove acceptable to the society,
committees should be appointed to arrange the details
and move at once in the work.