Part 24

"The spirit of our fathers Shall start from every wave; For the deck it was their field of fame, And ocean was their grave."

And the American can as justly reply:--

"Know that thy highest dwells at home, there art And loyal inspiration spring; If thou would'st touch the universal heart, Of thine own country sing."

Remembering its glorious past, its happy, peaceful, prosperous present--for it is the happiest land the sun shines upon--and the auspicious omens for the bright opening future, I ask you to pledge with me its representative head, the Commander-in-Chief of its Army and Navy, the President of the United States. [Toast drunk standing.]

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

SCIENCE AND ART

[Speech of Thomas H. Huxley at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1883. Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Academy, said in introducing him: "With science I couple the name under which we know one of the most fearless, keen and lucid intellects which have ever in this country grappled with the problems of natural science and set them solved before us, the name of Professor Huxley [cheers], a name known far and wide wherever the pregnant science of biology is studied, and through the vehicle of other tongues besides that strong and trenchant English with which he is wont to strike his thoughts so vigorously home."]

SIR FREDERIC LEIGHTON, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I beg leave to thank you for the extremely kind and appreciative manner in which you have received the toast of Science. It is the more grateful to me to hear that toast proposed in an assembly of this kind, because I have noticed of late years a great and growing tendency among those who were once jestingly said to have been born in a pre-scientific age to look upon science as an invading and aggressive force, which if it had its own way would oust from the universe all other pursuits. I think there are many persons who look upon this new birth of our times as a sort of monster rising out of the sea of modern thought with the purpose of devouring the Andromeda of art. And now and then a Perseus, equipped with the shoes of swiftness of the ready writer, with the cap of invisibility of the editorial article, and it may be with the Medusa-head of vituperation, shows himself ready to try conclusions with the scientific dragon. Sir, I hope that Perseus will think better of it [laughter]; first, for his own sake, because the creature is hard of head, strong of jaw, and for some time past has shown a great capacity for going over and through whatever comes in his way; and secondly, for the sake of justice, for I assure you, of my own personal knowledge that if left alone, the creature is a very debonair and gentle monster. [Laughter.] As for the Andromeda of art, he has the tenderest respect for that lady, and desires nothing more than to see her happily settled and annually producing a flock of such charming children as those we see about us. [Cheers.]

But putting parables aside, I am unable to understand how anyone with a knowledge of mankind can imagine that the growth of science can threaten the development of art in any of its forms. If I understand the matter at all, science and art are the obverse and reverse of Nature's medal, the one expressing the eternal order of things, in terms of feeling, the other in terms of thought. When men no longer love nor hate; when suffering causes no pity, and the tale of great deeds ceases to thrill, when the lily of the field shall seem no longer more beautifully arrayed than Solomon in all his glory, and the awe has vanished from the snow-capped peak and deep ravine, then indeed science may have the world to itself, but it will not be because the monster has devoured art, but because one side of human nature is dead, and because men have lost the half of their ancient and present attributes. [Cheers.]

ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL

THE MUSIC OF WAGNER

[Speech of Robert G. Ingersoll at the banquet given in New York City, April 2, 1891, by the Liederkranz Society to Edmund C. Stanton, director of German Opera in New York, and Anton Seidl, orchestral conductor. William Steinway presided, and called upon Robert Ingersoll to speak to the toast, "Music, Noblest of the Arts."]

MR. TOAST-MASTER:--It is probable that I was selected to speak about music, because, not knowing one note from another, I have no prejudice on the subject. All I can say is, that I know what I like, and, to tell the truth, I like every kind, enjoy it all, from the hand-organ to the orchestra.

Knowing nothing of the science of music, I am not always looking for defects, or listening for discords. As the young robin cheerfully swallows whatever comes, I hear with gladness all that is played.

Music has been, I suppose, a gradual growth, subject to the law of evolution; as nearly everything, with the possible exception of theology, has been and is under this law.

Music may be divided into three kinds: First, the music of simple time, without any particular emphasis--and this may be called the music of the heels; second, music in which time is varied, in which there is the eager haste and the delicious delay, that is, the fast and slow, in accordance with our feelings, with our emotions--and this may be called the music of the heart; third, the music that includes time and emphasis, the hastening and the delay, and something in addition, that produces not only states of feeling, but states of thought. This may be called the music of the head,--the music of the brain.

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language. It was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. Beneath the waves is the sea--above the clouds is the sky.

_ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL Photogravure after a photograph from life_

[Illustration]

Before man found a name for any thought, or thing, he had hopes and fears and passions, and these were rudely expressed in tones.

Of one thing, however, I am certain, and that is, that Music was born of love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have been uttered a strain of music. Possibly some mother, looking in the eyes of her babe, gave the first melody to the enraptured air.

Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translated into music. Music is the sunshine--the climate--of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.

I am also satisfied that the greatest music is the most marvellous mingling of Love and Death. Love is the greatest of all passions, and Death is its shadow. Death gets all its terror from Love, and Love gets its intensity, its radiance, its glory and its rapture from the darkness of Death. Love is a flower that grows on the edge of the grave.

The old music, for the most part, expresses emotion, or feeling, through time and emphasis, and what is known as melody. Most of the old operas consist of a few melodies connected by unmeaning recitative. There should be no unmeaning music. It is as though a writer should suddenly leave his subject and write a paragraph consisting of nothing but a repetition of one word like "the," "the," "the," or "if," "if," "if," varying the repetition of these words, but without meaning,--and then resume the subject of his article.

I am not saying that great music was not produced before Wagner but I am simply endeavoring to show the steps that have been taken. It was necessary that all the music should have been written, in order that the greatest might be produced. The same is true of the drama. Thousands and thousands prepared the way for the supreme dramatist, as millions prepared the way for the supreme composer.

When I read Shakespeare, I am astonished that he has expressed so much with common words, to which he gives new meaning; and so when I hear Wagner, I exclaim: Is it possible that all this is done with common air?

In Wagner's music there is a touch of chaos that suggests the infinite. The melodies seem strange and changing forms, like summer clouds, and weird harmonies come like sounds from the sea brought by fitful winds, and others moan like waves on desolate shores, and mingled with these, are shouts of joy, with sighs and sobs and ripples of laughter, and the wondrous voices of eternal love.

Wagner is the Shakespeare of Music.

The funeral march for Siegfried is the funeral music for all the dead. Should all the gods die, this music would be perfectly appropriate. It is elemental, universal, eternal.

The love-music in Tristan and Isolde is, like Romeo and Juliet an expression of the human heart for all time. So the love-duet in "The Flying Dutchman" has in it the consecration, the infinite self-denial, of love. The whole heart is given; every note has wings, and rises and poises like an eagle in the heaven of sound.

When I listen to the music of Wagner, I see pictures, forms, glimpses of the perfect, the swell of a hip, the wave of a breast, the glance of an eye. I am in the midst of great galleries. Before me are passing the endless panoramas. I see vast landscapes with valleys of verdure and vine with soaring crags, snow-crowned. I am on the wide seas, where countless billows burst into the whitecaps of joy. I am in the depths of caverns roofed with mighty crags, while through some rent I see the eternal stars. In a moment the music becomes a river of melody, flowing through some wondrous land; suddenly it falls in strange chasms, and the mighty cataract is changed to seven-hued foam.

Great music is always sad, because it tells us of the perfect; and such is the difference between what we are and that which music suggests, that even in the vase of joy we find some tears.

The music of Wagner has color, and when I hear the violins, the morning seems to slowly come. A horn puts a star above the horizon. The night, in the purple hum of the bass, wanders away like some enormous bee across wide fields of dead clover. The light grows whiter as the violins increase. Colors come from other instruments, and then the full orchestra floods the world with day.

Wagner seems not only to have given us new tones, new combinations, but the moment the orchestra begins to play his music, all the instruments are transfigured. They seem to utter the sounds that they have been longing to utter. The horns run riot; the drums and cymbals join in the general joy; the old bass viols are alive with passion; the 'cellos throb with love; the violins are seized with a divine fury, and the notes rush out as eager for the air as pardoned prisoners for the roads and fields.

The music of Wagner is filled with landscapes. There are some strains, like midnight, thick with constellations, and there are harmonies like islands in the far seas, and others like palms on the desert's edge. His music satisfies the heart and brain. It is not only for memory; not only for the present, but for prophecy.

Wagner was a sculptor, a painter in sound. When he died, the greatest fountain of melody that ever enchanted the world, ceased. His music will instruct and refine forever.

All that I know about the operas of Wagner I have learned from Anton Seidl. I believe that he is the noblest, tenderest and most artistic interpreter of the great composer that has ever lived.

SIR HENRY IRVING

LOOKING FORWARD

[Speech of Henry Irving[10] at a banquet given in his honor, London, July 4, 1883, in view of his impending departure for a professional tour of America. The Lord Chief Justice of England, John Duke Coleridge, occupied the chair.]

[Illustration: _MENU CARD Photogravure after a design by Thompson Willing_

Through the courtesy of the Lotus Club, we are enabled to reproduce this typical dinner card, especially drawn and engraved for a complimentary banquet to Sir Henry Irving. The original card is about three times the size of this reproduction.

DINNER TO

SIR HENRY IRVING

GIVEN BY THE

LOTOS CLUB

SATURDAY OCT 28

MDCCCXCIX]

MY LORD CHIEF JUSTICE, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I cannot conceive a greater honor entering into the life of any man than the honor you have paid me by assembling here to-night. To look around this room and scan the faces of my distinguished hosts, would stir to its depths a colder nature than mine. It is not in my power, my lords and gentlemen, to thank you for the compliment you have to-night paid me.

"The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel."

Never before have I so strongly felt the magic of those words; but you will remember it is also said in the same sentence, "Give thy thoughts no tongue." [Laughter.] And gladly, had it been possible, would I have obeyed that wise injunction to-night. [Renewed laughter.]

The actor is profoundly influenced by precedent, and I cannot forget that many of my predecessors have been nerved by farewell banquets for the honor which awaited them on the other side of the Atlantic; but this occasion I regard as much more than a compliment to myself: I regard it as a tribute to the art which I am proud to serve and I believe that feeling will be shared by the profession to which you have assembled to do honor. [Cheers.] The time has long gone by when there was any need to apologize for the actor's calling. ["Hear! Hear!"] The world can no more exist without the drama than it can without its sister art, music. The stage gives the readiest response to the demand of human nature to be transported out of itself into the realms of the ideal--not that all our ideals on the stage are realized--none but the artist knows how immeasurably he may fall short of his aim or his conception,--but to have an ideal in art and to strive through one's life to embody it, may be a passion to the actor as it may be to the poet.

Your lordship has spoken most eloquently of my career. Possessed of a generous mind and a high judicial faculty, your lordship has been to-night, I fear, more generous than judicial. But if I have in any way deserved commendation, I am proud that it was as an actor that I won it. As the director of a theatre my experience has been short, but as an actor I have been before the London public for seventeen years; and on one thing I am sure you will all agree--that no actor or manager has ever received from that public more generous and ungrudging encouragement and support. [Cheers.]

Concerning our visit to America, I need hardly say that I am looking forward to it with no common pleasure. It has often been an ambition with English actors to gain the good-will of the English-speaking race, a good-will which is right heartily reciprocated towards our American fellow-workers, when they gratify us by sojourning here. Your God-speed would alone assure me a hearty welcome in any land. But I am not going amongst strangers; I am going amongst friends, and when I, for the first time, touch American ground, I shall receive many a grip of the hand from men whose friendship I am proud to possess. [Cheers.] Concerning our expedition the American people will no doubt exercise an independent judgment--a prejudice of theirs and a habit of long standing [laughter], as your lordship has reminded us, by the fact that to-day is the fourth of July, an anniversary rapidly becoming an English institution. Your lordship is doubtless aware, as to-night has so happily proved, that the stage has reckoned amongst its staunchest supporters many great and distinguished lawyers. There are many lawyers, I am told, in America, and as I am sure that they all deserve to be judges, I am in hopes that they will materially help me to gain a favorable verdict from the American people. [Cheers and laughter.]

I have given but poor expression to my sense of the honor you have conferred upon me, and upon the comrades associated with me in this our enterprise--an enterprise which, I hope, will favorably show the method and discipline of a company of English actors. On their behalf I thank you, and I also thank you on behalf of the lady who has so adorned the Lyceum stage, and to whose rare gifts your lordship has paid so just and gracious a tribute. The climax of the favor extended to me by my countrymen has been reached to-night. You have set upon me a burden of responsibility, a burden which I gladly and proudly bear. The memory of to-night will be to me a sacred thing, a memory which will, throughout my life, be ever treasured, a memory which will stimulate me to further endeavor, and encourage me to loftier aim. [Loud and continued cheers.]

* * * * *

THE DRAMA

[Speech of Sir Henry Irving at the fourteenth annual dinner of the Playgoer's Club, London, February 14, 1898. The toast of "The Drama" was proposed by B. W. Findon, and Sir Henry Irving was called upon to respond.]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--It is five years since I had the pleasure of sitting at your hospitable board and listening to that delightfully soothing and digestive eloquence with which we medicine one another after dinner. [Laughter.] In the course of those five years I daresay we have had many differences of opinion. The playgoer does not always agree with the player, still less with that unfortunate object, the poor actor-manager. But whatever you may have said of me in this interval, and in terms less dulcet, perhaps, than those which your chairman has so generously employed, it is a great satisfaction to me to feel that I still retain your esteem and good-will. In a certain sense you are the manager's constituents. You cannot eject him from the office, perhaps, with that directness which distinguishes the Parliamentary operations. But you can stay away from the theatre, and so eject his play. [Laughter.] On the whole that is a more disconcerting process than the fiercest criticism. One can always argue with the critics, though on the actor's part I know that is gross presumption. [Laughter.] But you cannot argue with the playgoer who stays away.

I am not making any specific accusations--only remarking that it is staying-power which impresses the importance of the Playgoer's Club upon the managerial mind. Moreover, to meet you like this has the effect of a useful tonic. I can strongly recommend it to some gentlemen who write to the newspapers. [Laughter.] In one journal there was a long correspondence--the sort of thing we generally get at one season of the year--about the condition of the stage, and a well-known writer who, I believe, combines the function of a dramatic critic with the responsibility of a watch-dog to the Navy, informed his readers that the sad decadence of the British Drama was due to the evils of party government. That is certainly an original idea; but I fancy that if the author were to unfold it to this company, he would be told that he had mistaken the Playgoer's Club for the War Office or the Admiralty. Still we ought to be grateful to the man who reveals a perfectly fresh reason for the eternal decline of the drama, though we may not, perhaps, anticipate any revolution in theatrical amusements even from the most thorough-going reform of the British Constitution.

In the public correspondence to which I have referred, a good deal was said about the need for a dramatic conservatoire. If such an institution could be rooted in this country, I have no doubt that it might yield many advantages. Years ago I ventured to suggest that the municipal system might be applied to the theatre, as it is on the Continent, though I do not observe that this is yet a burning question in the county council politics, or that any reforming administrator has discovered that the drama ought to be laid on, like gas or water. [Laughter.] With all our genius for local government we have not yet found, like some Continental peoples, that the municipal theatre is as much a part of the healthy life of the community as the municipal library or museum. ["Hear! hear!"] Whether that development is in store for us I do not know, but I can imagine certain social benefits that would accrue from the municipal incorporation of a dramatic conservatoire. It might check the rush of incompetent persons into the theatrical profession. Some persons who were intended by Nature to adorn an inviolable privacy are thrust upon us by paragraphers and interviewers, whose existence is a dubious blessing--[laughter]--until it is assumed by censors of the stage that this business is part and parcel of theatrical advertisement.

Columns of this rubbish are printed every week, and many an actor is pestered to death for tit-bits about his ox and his ass and everything that is his. [Laughter.] Occasionally you may read solemn articles about the insatiable vanity of the actor, which must be gratified at any cost, as if vanity were peculiar to any section of humanity. But what this organized gossip really advertises is the industry of the gentlemen who collect it, and the smartness of the papers in which it is circulated. "We learn this," "We have reason to believe"--such forms of intolerable assurance give currency too often to scandalous and lying rumors which I am sure responsible journalism would wish to discourage. But this, I fear, is difficult, for contradiction makes another desirable paragraph, and it is all looked upon as desirable copy. [Laughter.]

Of course, gentlemen, the drama is declining--it always has been declining since the time of Roscius and beyond the palmy days when the famous Elephant Raja was "starred" over the head of W. C. Macready, and the real water tank in the Cataract of the Ganges helped to increase the attractions of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. But we ourselves are evidently in a parlous state at the present day, when actors vainly endeavor to struggle through twenty lines of blank verse--when we are told mechanical effects and vast armies of supers make up the production of historical plays--when pathological details, we are told, are always well received--when the "psychonosological" (whatever that may be)--[laughter], is invariably successful--and when Pinero and Grundy's plays do not appeal to men of advanced thought, as I read the other day.